Health is Membership: 25 Years Later

Restoring love, healing, wholeness, and health to the lexicon of modern American health care.

Sunrise and farmland of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Trappist, Kentucky, June 2018.

This month marks the 26th anniversary of Wendell Berry’s seminal essay on health, community, and connection, “Health is Membership”. In the essay, Berry sought to restore love, healing, wholeness, and health to the lexicon of modern American health care.

Since last October, we have reflected on the ongoing importance of Berry’s essay to our thinking about health, healthcare, and flourishing. Many of these reflections can be found in our six-episode podcast series Health is Membership: 25 Years Later. In the series, our CEO Joe Waters speaks with his guests about the erosion of attention, growing up at scale, clickbait culture, the value of limits, patients as “inhabitants of stories”, and why “cradle to career” is a bad idea.

We invite you to listen.