Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84Plough Quarterly • Winter 2017 45 Both grandfathers display the sort of response – dare I say, repentance – lacking in Berry’s Port William. The result can be that we, the readers, long for a dishonest ideal. Rather than a wistful reading of Berry’s fictionalized world as too good to be true, I would propose that Port William – even before the plunder of corporate industrialism – is not good enough. If Port William signifies the American Dream, then it is good only to the extent that its self- described “membership” is expansive enough to welcome the displaced and uninitiated. It is honorable to the extent that it righteously protests every sort of threat to both human and natural environments. This dream is too large to be contained at a local or even national level; it requires a gospel- sized imagination. Through this lens, we can imagine the sort of grace that roots us with affection for the place we live, yes, but over- flows the bounds of time and place with the ever-sustained economy of Christ’s kingdom. In my life and in the family stories handed down to me, I’ve learned the cost of misaligned devotion to an ideal. No one has spoken more clearly to me on the subject than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, in his Life Together: In Christian brotherhood everything depends upon its being clear right from the begin- ning . . . that Christian brotherhood is not an ideal, but a divine reality. . . . Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves. . . . A com- munity which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, perma- nently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Those of us who live within the divine reality Bonhoeffer describes can ask this question with even more clarity: In what ways might our allegiance to ideals (agrarian or otherwise) diverge from the gospel reality? In Port William, Berry envisions membership in a special kind of community, bound by mutual Bob Bell, Kentucky Barn