Jeffrey L. Bilbro

Education

• B.A., George Fox University
• Ph.D., Baylor University

Selected Research

• I’m broadly interested in questions of aesthetic form, theology and the virtues. Much of my writing has focused on environmental or agrarian literature and theology, particularly the work of Wendell Berry. Recently, I’ve been turning my attention to issues of media ecology and considering how shifts in 19th-century American print culture might inform our understanding of today’s digital media.

Courses and Specialties

• Among others, I’m teaching a course on Wendell Berry, who I’ve been reading, thinking with, and writing about for well over a decade. I’m also teaching a professional editing course, which flows out of my role as editor for the Front Porch Republic.

Advice for Students

• Pursue tough and important questions relentlessly. When you set out to address these kinds of questions, you’ll have to draw widely from different disciplines. I’ve been trained in the English discipline, but in my research and writing I’ve had to incorporate the work of people from the sciences, history, theology and other areas. In my classes I try to gesture toward some of these far-reaching connections, and I hope that will prompt students to pursue their own investigations.

Selected Publications

• Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021.
• Virtues of Renewal: Wendell Berry’s Sustainable Forms. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019.
• The Saint John’s Bible and its Tradition: Illuminating Beauty in the Twenty-First Century. Edited with Jack Baker and Daniel Train. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2018.
• Telling the Stories Right: Wendell Berry’s Imagination of Port William. Edited with Jack Baker. Eugene, OR: Front Porch Republic Books, 2018.
• Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place with Jack Baker. Foreword by Wendell Berry. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017.
• Loving God’s Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015.