We no longer see the person in the uniform or the human being behind the company, we do not see our neighbors. Rather, we see individual human beings as little more than avatars for political or religious opinions. And when those opinions prove objectionable, we feel no remorse or regret about separating ourselves from the person in their entirety. We must shun them in every realm of human life, not merely in our personal friendships but in our commercial behaviors as well. (Thus there is a close link between our boycott culture and our shame culture.) Because we no longer see human beings when we look at our neighbors but only avatars for political agendas, we must separate ourselves from anyone who supports an agenda we find distasteful lest we would ourselves somehow become complicit in their support of that agenda. 

 If Christians will boycott Starbucks, let it be because of the way they do business, not because of the opinions their higher-ups profess. What is at stake in our ability to buy Starbucks with a clean conscience is not simply a few dollars, but our ability to look at the creatures who surround us and see not an amalgamation of opinions and commercial interests, but a human being.

Jake Meador, "Boycotts and the End of Neighborliness"

Near the end of The Gift of Good Land, Wendell Berry writes, “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.” This quote, perhaps more than any other quotation from his work, gets to the heart of Berry’s vision and the purpose of his writing. Berry’s project for over 50 years has been to argue for the goodness of reverent breaking and to demonstrate its possibility.

But as Berry’s phrasing suggests, reverent breaking is not just about discrete actions, but about the kind of people we are. Most of us who exploit the world, after all, are not so vicious that we willingly do things to desecrate God’s creation. Rather, we do it through our carelessness, laziness, or ignorance, failing to recognize the connection between our actions and the health of creation. And so the real question with Berry isn’t so much how we can break creation reverently, but how we can become the sort of people capable of breaking creation reverently. And this is why Berry’s novels are so vital to understanding his work. For it is in his novels that he shows us how we can go about becoming the sort of person capable of such a relationship to the created order.

Jake Meador, "Wendell Berry's 'Room of Love'"