Extended description

end/ Prophetic speech is exorcism's counter-spell. An archetypal irruption—truth sounded—it sets refiner’s fire to pseudo-order, evil’s veneers, and hollow abstraction, revoking its claim and rebinding the field to truth. Where the Word sounds, the Real can bear weight again. 7/ When the System metabolizes resistance, eating it, only prophetic speech stands outside—the sole sovereign language left to counter the capture of being itself. It doesn’t argue with psychosis; it interrupts it. Not protest, but eschatology—the voice no model can counterfeit. Excerpt from Virtues of Renewal, Wendell Berry’s Sustainable Forms (Culture Of The Land) 2018, by Jeffrey Bilbro. 71. Kaveny, Prophecy without Contempt, 288. Kaveny expands on this claim, arguing  that “the rhetoric of prophetic indictment is best understood as a sort of moral chemo￾therapy, a reaction to a potentially life-threatening distortion in ordinary, day-to-day  moral discussion. Deliberative discourse is, in fact, that ordinary form of moral discussion. . . . In some cases, however, our ordinary form of discussion can be gravely corrupted, perhaps by the incorporation of a false major premise, perhaps because of the  dependence on a mistaken minor premise. Such mistakes are made all the time in matters  small and large. In some few cases, however, the mistake is about such a fundamental  matter that it threatens to undermine the very possibility of moral and political reasoning within the community.  .  .  . Prophetic indictment relentlessly—and sometimes  ruthlessly—targets the corruption that, left unchecked, would undermine the possibility  of sound moral deliberation more generally” (287–88; see also 308–16). Berry’s use of the  prophetic mode parallels Walter Brueggemann’s description in his seminal Prophetic  Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001). Other scholars have situated  Berry in the context of Old Testament prophecy: see Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agri￾culture, and Todd Edmondson, Priest, Prophet, Pilgrim: Types and Distortions of Spiritual  186  Notes to Pages 75–81 Vocation in the Fiction of Wendell Berry and Cormac McCarthy (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and  Stock, 2014), 47–54.