Wendell Berry, writer and farmer, was extolled by many as a modern-day prophet

(RNS) — 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.’”

The beloved writer and environmentalist, who died at age 92 on Monday (Aug. 31) in his Kentucky home, was an academic himself but left the ivory tower for his home county of Henry, Kentucky. There, he farmed and wrote for most of his life, mostly with pencil and paper in an old family cabin.

A trenchant critic of industrialization and Big Ag, the sprawling collection of giant, often multinational farming corporations, Berry’s principal influence was on the field of environmental…