Often presented as a straightforward “southern agrarian” writer, or as a holdover from another time, Berry was a good deal more complex than either of these labels might suggest.
The deficit in trinitarian faith that afflicts American evangelicalism is no small thing. It results in preaching that pictures Jesus as the way to God, while hardly noticing that Jesus is God already with us, giving us not only salvation but God himself in his own flesh.
If we refuse to assume the responsibilities of the old, if we pretend already to be contemporaries, we have nothing to pass on, monetarily or spiritually.
Her characteristic blond hair, her surgically enhanced features, and her presentation of Southern class always seemed an exaggeration of reality, but this was exactly the point. She became a persona—the persona of Southern life.
