On Friday, July 17, 2020 we welcomed writer, poet, and professor Marilyn McEntyre for an Online Conversation to discuss her provocative book, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies. The book focuses on the morality, power, and importance of caring for language. She notes that caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words. Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another. If language is to retain its power to nourish and sustain our common life, we have to care for it the way good farmers care for the earth.

• Learn more about Marilyn McEntyre

• Watch the full Online Conversation video and read the transcript

• Watch our Online Conversation with Marilyn McEntyre and David Bailey on “Speaking Peace and Seeking Reconciliation.”

• Check out her brand new book called Where the Eye Alights: Reflections for the Forty Days of Lent.

Authors mentioned in the conversation:

• Jane Austen
• Ezra Pound - “Go in fear of abstractions.”
• George Steiner - Real Presences
• Theodor Adorno
• William Faulkner
• Wendell Berry

Books mentioned in the conversation:

• The Road to Character, by David Brooks
• Blind Spot, by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald
• Winnie the Pooh, by A.A. Milne
• Little Women, by Louis May Alcott
• The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
• Middlemarch, by George Eliot
• Prayers of the Cosmos and The Hidden Gospel by Neil Douglass Klutz

BBC Radio Program - My Word

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

• Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell
• Bulletins from Immortality, by Emily Dickinson
• Letters from Van Gogh, by Vincent Van Gogh
• Hannah and Nathan, by Wendell Berry

Special thanks to Ned Bustard for the artwork and Andrew Peterson for the music!