The Baltimore meeting hall was packed in 2013 when, at the annual American Academy of Religion conference, Wendell Berry received the Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion.
The Kentucky farmer, who wrote lyrical poems, novels, and essays about agriculture, small family farms, food, and community, was considered something of a prophet by Christian seminarians, theologians and religion scholars.
“As we walked the convention floor, it was like a parting of the sea,” said Norman Wirzba, professor of theology, ecology, and rural life at Duke Divinity School, who interviewed Berry on the stage. “People wanted to come up and touch him and say, ‘You have changed my life.’”
