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Harvest Thanksgiving and the Anglican agrarian imagination

During the weekend past, many parish churches across these Islands will have celebrated Harvest Thanksgiving.  This festival is one of the most popular expressions of Anglicanism's agrarian imagination.  And that agrarian imagination should be celebrated, fostered, and nurtured within contemporary Anglicanism.

Why?  In the words of Wendell Berry:

Hard as it may be for a dislocated, miseducated, consumptive society to accept, and for its pet economists to believe, the future of food is not distinguishable from the future of the land, which is indistinguishable in turn from the future of human care.  It depends ultimately on the health, not of the financial system, but of the ecosphere.  In the interest of that health, we will have to bring all the disciplines, all the arts and sciences, into conformity with the nature of places - 'The Future of Farming' in The World-Ending Fire.

Anglicanism should celebrate its agrarian imagination because a renewed agrarian imagination is precisely what is required in the face of the grave environmental challenges faced by our culture.  To take one example, one of the authors of the recent UK State of Nature 2019 report has stated: "We know more about the UK's wildlife than any other country on the planet, and what it is telling us should make us sit up and listen. We need to respond more urgently across the board".

A renewed agrarian imagination has the ability to bring us to - again quoting Berry - "reexamine the economic structures of our life, and conform them to the tolerances and limits of our earthly places" ('Faustian Economics', ibid.)  It can do so not least because such an imagination is not a matter of abstractions but is rooted in the love and celebration of place, what Roger Scruton in Green Philosophy: How To Think Seriously About The Planet terms oikophilia, the love of home (albeit I have very serious reservations about the complacency Scruton reveals in his ideological commitment to the ability of the free market to respond to our environmental crises):

... oikophilia, the love of home, a motive that comprehends all our deepest attachments, and which spills out in the moral, aesthetic and spiritual emotions that transfigure our world.

Harvest Thanksgiving is a means of nurturing such "spiritual emotions that transfigure our world", a celebration of what John Milbank terms the Anglican tradition's "radically conservative celebration of the mystical significance of" nature, against "the dead matter of the Newtonian universe". 

Which brings us back to Anglicanism's agrarian imagination, not a cause of embarrassment, a reactionary distraction in an urban, globalized, virtual world, but a source of renewing and deepening a reverence for nature amidst multiple environmental crises.  The Anglican agrarian imagination is to be valued, celebrated and deepened precisely because it is removed from and challenges contemporary cultural and economic assumptions, assumptions destructive of nature, place, and home.

(The painting is David G. Hankey, 'Moira Parish Church'.)

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