What Wendell Berry Taught Me About Heaven

When I heard that Wendell Berry had died, my mind flashed back to his kitchen table on a hot Kentucky evening about 15 years ago, where I was as nerve-racked as I have ever been. Since no writer in my lifetime has more shaped my life and thought—through short stories and novels and essays and poems I’ve read since I was a middle-schooler—I agreed with Mr. Berry on almost everything. Then he cleared his throat and brought up one of the only subjects where I thought he was going to give me a stern talking-to. That subject was heaven.