Soil and Sacrament - 9781451663303

Part spiritual quest, part agricultural travelogue, this moving and profound exploration of the joy and solace found in returning to the garden is inspiring and beautiful.

After he graduated from Duke Divinity School, Fred Bahnson underwent an agrarian conversion. Trading the pulpit for the plough, Bahnson helped start a community garden in Cedar Grove, North Carolina—a town struggling under an unspoken racial divide.

As Anathoth Community Garden slowly cultivates a new future as a progressive multi-racial society, Bahnson is likewise transformed from shy and self-effacing to a charismatic leader. His time at Anathoth becomes the impetus for a road trip spent visiting different faith-based agrarian groups, one for each season—from a community of Roman Catholic monks who pursue a life of contemplation while harvesting rare mushrooms on a Southern plantation, to a Jewish organic farm in the Berkshires, where he and other young people learn the agrarian arts of ancient Israel right in Connecticut.

Recently appointed director of Wake Forest University School of Divinity's pioneering Food, Faith, and Religious Leadership Initiative, Bahnson is the perfect guide on this lyrical and inspiring journey. Through his travels across the country and into his own past, Bahnson comes to see “how our yearning for real food is inextricably bound up in our spiritual desire to be fed” and discovers how rituals of cultivation can become a powerful source of community and purpose.