Cornerstone professors Matthew Bonzo and Michael Stevens call for readers to pursue “intentional living” in their new book “Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader’s Guide.”

After three and a half years of solidifying contracts, writing and editing, the book will hit the shelves on Dec. 1.

A byproduct of their admiration for novelist Wendell Berry, Bonzo and Stevens’ work serves as an explanation of Berry’s ideology of life and seeks to explain how it can be applied on three levels: within families, within households and within communities.

“What we were trying to do is to make his work more accessible and more well-known to the churched world,” Bonzo said.

Berry believes that meaningful lives are directly related to healthy communities. Such communities are composed of people intentionally keeping things local. In contrast, the emphasis on global economics and greedy corporations has resulted in fragmented communities, a loss of communal identity and a disregard for environmental responsibility.

“Healthy lives are lived in finite, intelligibly-sized and -shaped communities,” Stevens said, “not anonymously out in a global world at large knowing only my own individual pod, but in intelligible, local communities.”

According to Bonzo, a common misconception is that by making everything “bigger” through corporations and globalization, people are being unified.

“Getting bigger, going corporate is actually more fragmented,” Bonzo said. “Fragmentation is the problem; further fragmentation is not the solution. At some point you have to put it back together again.”

For Bonzo and Stevens, healthy communities are the answer. These are formed through choices such as dependence on local farms rather than large corporations, investment in the lives of others within your community and viewing communities as long-term commitments. However, such choices are only effective if made by all members of the community.

“It has to be a communal activity,” Bonzo said. “I think individuals trying to do it by themselves would fail pretty quickly.”

Practically speaking, this type of activity is seen through choices such as going to local restaurants, sharing meals with other families and becoming involved in community supported farms, such as Bonzo’s own farm in Sand Lake, Mich.

Both writers hope that, through their book, they will be able to encourage the church to be the “nexus of a local community” rather than a “place with a parking lot that a bunch of people drive in and drive out of.”

For Stevens, the current economic crisis has provided an ample opportunity for people in the church to explore Berry’s ideas.

“Instead of thinking things in terms of, ‘Oh my gosh, [we’re having] this tragic fallout’ they could say, ‘Here’s an opportunity to do things better,’” Stevens said. “If we can make the kind of choices that Wendell’s been writing about for 40 years, we might find life bolder rather than empty, tragic and disastrous as people have talked about.”

 “It presents [people] with an alternative,” Bonzo said. “There are ways to conceive of economic exchanges that aren’t rooted in greed, that are actually rooted in care and in an awareness of your local community.”

Ultimately, Bonzo and Stevens believe an emphasis on community is not about affecting people economically but instead improving their quality of life.

“It’s not only better in an economic sense; it’s just a better way to live,” Stevens said. “It’s just more full of life and character and imagination than the sort of modes offered to us in our culture where all the strip malls look the same, every town looks the same, every city looks the same.”

“For me to take my kids up to Bonzo’s farm, run around in the fields, destroy half the stuff and pick some of it, ride in the tractor – it’s a more beautiful way to live than just going to Meijer every week.”