With the death of Wendell Berry and Dolly Parton within a week of one another, these two with very different audiences, nonetheless spoke from a love and acknowledgement of place with deep spiritual resonances. Their Southern sense of being shaped by a “natural” setting, which included people, meant that their primary medium was art, not because they were departing from reality but because imagination, as much as geography, constituted their place. They were both cultivators of imagination through poetry, song, and story, or the realms rooted in imagination from which and to which they appealed. Both addressed the essential question of what people are for, and their answer came from and pointed to the intimate perspective of grounded community. This may be more ambiguous in Parton’s music and Dollywood than it is in Berry’s self-conscious theological stance, but both evoke a sense of place and belonging.
Though neither was churchy both were churched with Berry a lifelong member of New Castle Baptist Church and a regular attender of Port Royal Baptist Church, and Dolly raised in her Grandfather’s Pentecostal church though she abandoned institutional church. Yet, Dollywood is overtly evangelical in its appeal, with a regular church service held in the park in the Robert F. Thomas Chapel, while Berry makes only a broad spiritual (non-institutional) appeal, but with a more programmatic ideal of recognizing belonging and community. They both spoke from the sense of a structured spiritual community of unconditional love, from which some may have fallen but to which all could be restored. For example, Berry’s fictional character, Peach (in, A Place on Earth) is a lifelong alcoholic, who causes great pain and never recovers, but is loved unconditionally by his sister, Dorie Catlett, in spite of all. Dolly’s favorite and perhaps most definitive song, “Coat of Many Colors,” speaks of the same unconditional suffering love, stronger than poverty and bullying oppression.
The folks of my little country church, who could be the subjects of a Wendell Berry story, live on farms handed down through some three generations, with a deep sense of place, as in Berry’s stories. They know who is doing what on their farms, and they mark place by the generations of people whom they have known all of their lives. Mary Sue, for example, remembers the stories of her grandmother being brought from Kentucky to Missouri, in a covered wagon. The log cabin her grandfather built still stands in some form and her brother, Larry, farms the land of their father, and their son owns an adjacent farm. They have never heard of Wendell Berry, but are quite familiar with the music of Dolly Parton, as consumers of the Grand Ole Opry and the blue grass and country music of this region (Green Top Missouri, just down the road, is home of Rhonda Vincent, the Queen of Bluegrass and of Daily and Vincent fame, whom they follow closely). Our little church and its extended family contain the stories of any group of people, PTSD, suicide, homicide, and acceptance of what Berry calls waywardness. This is something they recognize in Dolly.
Dolly speaks a spiritual and emotional language, from places of suffering. In her song, The Bridge, she sings of love, pregnancy, and abandonment, in which a young woman contemplates suicide: “My feet are moving slowly, closer to the edge, here is where it started, and here is where I’ll end it.” Her songs include stories of stillborn births (“Down From Dover”), shame (“Just Because I’m a Woman”), abuse (“A Gamble Either Way”), adoption (“Doing This for Your Sake”), isolation (“Two Doors Down”), mental institutions (“Daddy Come and Get Me”), and prostitution (“The Bargain Store”).[1] As the Time writer, Shima Oliaee notes in the title to her article, “Dolly Parton Loved Us All, Darlin’.”
Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert describe the impact of her healing love. Ebert recounted in his 2011 memoir, Life Itself, that after interviewing Parton, he felt filled with a “strange ethereal grace.” On the flight back to Chicago, when Ebert confessed this comforting sensation to Siskel, Siskel interrupted to say, “This will sound crazy, but when I was interviewing Dolly Parton, I almost felt like she had healing powers.” Like the movie critics, Oliaee describes Dolly’s healing presence: “At the time, I was looking for someone or something to believe in. “On the television and in the news, hatred from both sides of the American political aisle had never seemed more grotesque, but at Parton’s show, we all sang together.” Parton toured more than 60 cities all over the country with the same result. “Looking back, I can’t help but wonder if she knew it would be something of a healing tour, the last of its kind she would do.” In Dolly Parton’s world, according to Dolly, “I just think we need to love one another. I think we need to try a little harder. We need to be a little kinder. We need to be a little smarter. We need to have more love and compassion.”[2]
While not necessarily programmatically clear, Dolly illustrated in her own semi-fictional persona what she meant. Openly imitating the town tramp (her words) she dressed according to this exaggerated glamour: yellow hair, bright red lipstick, long nails, high-heeled shoes, and a tight skirt. “I thought [that woman] was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. So I grew up to look just like her!”[3] The irony is not lost, but neither is the empathy. She raised up the lowest, by direct identification. Dolly herself is the personal embodiment of an imagined embrace: “Sometimes you have to look like Jezebel in order to get some angelic things done in the world.”[4]
She grew up surrounded by the glories of the Smokies, but there is no idealized sentimentality in the description of the poverty. Her father, who worked from sunup to sundown, never learned to read or write, but as her father worked, her mother sang the songs from the “old place,” Irish and Welsh folk songs. Music that evoked place as much as Berry’s fiction. And this place of the heart involved a love for all: “I just love people,” she said. “When I look at the audience I see my family. I see the God light, the goodness, in everybody, even if they can’t see it.”[5] Maybe that universal identification is what inspired Nelson Mandella to request her music be played over the prison loudspeakers at Robben Island. If Berry writes fiction which he hopes will inspire action, Dolly embodied a semi-fictional persona, and created a real fictional city, Dollywood, with the aim of making the possibilities of her imagination a reality.
Berry undertakes this task through his fiction, poetry, political action, and by staying and working on the farm and living in the community into which he was born. As he puts it in Imagination in Place, “I have made the imagined town of Port William, its neighborhood and membership, in an attempt to honor the actual place where I have lived.”[6] He acknowledges that this was an inheritance, which he was never without. “Most of my forebears for the last two hundred years could have said the same thing. I was born to people who knew this place intimately, and I grew up knowing it intimately.”[7] Nonetheless his is a conscious choice to stay, to be a farmer who writes. He has not lived on the farm to write, though the writing flows from the place. “The place is precedent to my work, especially my fiction, and is, as I shall try to show, inevitably different from it.”[8] He describes this place with the recognition of a university-trained writer, returned home from Stanford and New York, aiming to preserve a style of life through writing and example.
Berry has a clear understanding of the theological ground of his sense of community, deploying Paul’s language “we are members of one another” he assumes this is meant to include all of creation: “Whether we know it or not, whether we want to be or not, we are members of one another: humans (ourselves and our enemies), earthworms, whales, snakes, squirrels, trees, topsoil, flowers, weeds, germs, hills, rivers, swifts, and stones—all of ‘us.’”[9] The “dominion mandate” of Genesis tells us that people are to care for creation, not as exploiters but as part of creation. The sense is of belonging to creation and not it belonging to us. Berry describes an interdependency, which does not make a direct appeal to organized religion, but which seems to require belief. He says, “It seems to me that we belong to each other and to God.”[10] As his fictional character Burley Coulter explains, “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but who knows it and who don’t.”[11] Berry imagines he may be improving on Paul: “All of us humans and all the creatures are, in fact, members of one another, whether we know it or not. St. Paul’s beautiful metaphor is right; it only needs to be more inclusive.”[12] Berry the writer is better than Berry the theologian, in that he is correct in describing a universal salvation, which the New Testament hit upon before Burley or Wendell.
Peter explains there will be a final restoration [apocatastasis] of all things, as God promised long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21). Paul notes, this restoration is cosmic as God’s purpose is “to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ” (Ephesians 1:9–10). “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 1:19–20). Christ’s embodiment is extended universally (to all people and all things), throughout every phase of his life, death and resurrection. The Word made flesh is meaning incarnate to the senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell, and is incarnate in the manner of his life. Christ embodies a new sort of human, a new human community, shared in its material and sensuous form.
Berry is correct, this “more comprehensive truth” is not a biological reduction, or a bland egalitarianism. As Joseph Wierbe notes, “Burley is not ‘more comprehensive’ insofar as the meaning of his ‘membership’ is received from something other than the body of Christ; it is not. Berry blames Paul for institutionalizing Jesus’ teachings into a sectional and exclusionary order, which is what Burley resists.”[13] It may be that Berry has not understood the radical universalism he describes, is derived from the New Testament. The fundamental lesson of the incarnation is that embodiment in general is the carrier of meaning, and that Christ’s embodiment is the fullness of meaning extended universally. It is universal in that it is all-inclusive not simply of all people but of everything about them, most particularly their embodied condition. It is this incarnational reality and necessity, in its particular instantiation in Kentucky, which Berry beautifully captures.
Burley Coulter characterizes, what he calls the “wayward” quality of himself and Port William. He rambles in the woods, hunts, fishes, squirrels, and partakes in drinking and dancing and frustrates his friends and family, especially Wheeler who is “committed to considerations of order, regularity, and merit.”[14] Yet Burley is forgiving and capacious in his love. He explains to his lawyer friend, “I ain’t saying we don’t have to know what we ought to have been and ought to be, but we oughtn’t to let that stand between us. That ain’t the way we are.”[15] Burley explains the sense in which being “wayward” should be part of the possibility of community. “If the things of this world are wayward, then he will say so, and love them as they are. But as his friends know, it is hard to be a friend of Wheelers and settle for things as they are.”[16] Wheeler will hardly stand for the possible let alone the wayward, but Burley in his waywardness is also most prepared to accept people and the world as they are. This acceptance strikes Wheeler as an affront to community, a threat to its existence, but for Burley, this is the very love which constitutes Port William membership. “The way a place in this world is passed on in time is not regular nor plain, Wheeler. It goes pretty close to accidental. But how else could it go? A deed nor a will, no writing at all, can tell you much about it. Even when it looks regular and plain, you know that somewhere it has been chancy, and just slipped by.”[17] Not every difference, he explains, needs to be fixed. “All I see that I’m certain of is that it has got to be turned loose – loose is the way it is – to who knows what.”[18] Berry is describing a capacious compassion through Burley, while the rigid legalism of Wheeler pictures a community that does not and cannot exist. Forgiveness, compassion, and acceptance, are the ingredients of true community. Berry is realistic in his portrayal of a robust community, recognizing human failure and the need for acceptance. In novel after novel, he captures the realities of place, its enfleshed beauty, suggesting this belonging is the stuff of an integrated and complete life.
In my part of Missouri disappearance of small farms is a foregone conclusion, though a Port William like membership (Berry’s mythical town) is descriptive of Cairo (our village), if not so clearly defined as a work of fiction. As Berry notes, “works of imagination come of an impulse to transcend the limits of experience or provable knowledge in order to make a thing that is whole.”[19] At Liberty Church there is no felt sense of resisting (industrialization or urbanization), but simply the sense of caring for this place. The humble little white building (described here) is so unpretentious that it serves as a levelling device, much like the tiny entrance to a Japanese tea room (all are made to bow equally). There is no financial or political gain in this levelling place, but only a singular acceptance. In other words, there is a vested interest, a membership, rooted in this country chapel. This resistance is not ideological or an informed program, but a practical stance, in that we live out our lives with a sense of belonging to this place, described by Wendell and Dolly.
[1] Shima Oliaee, Dolly Parton Loved Us All, Darlin’ Time Magazine (Aug, 25, 2026).
[2] Time Interview.
[3] Time Interview.
[4] Time Interview.
[5] Time Interview.
[6] Wendell Berry, Imagination in Place, (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010), 15.
[7] Imagination in Place, 1.
[8] Imagination in Place, 1.
[9] Morris Allen Grubbs, ed., Conversations with Wendell Berry (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 111. Cited in Joseph Wiebe, Wendell Berry’s Imagination in Place: Affection, Community and Literature (unpublished PhD McMaster University, 2013.
[10] Grubbs, Conversations, 107. Cited in Wiebe, 2.
[11] Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), 136-137.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Wierbe, 3.
[14] Fritz Oehlschlaeger, The Achievement of Wendell Berry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 144. Cited in Wierbe, 3.
[15] The Wild Birds, 136.
[16] The Wild Birds, 123.
[17] The Wild Birds, 122
[18] The Wild Birds, 122.
[19] Imagination in Place, 3.