Soil and Sacrament : Four Seasons among the Keepers of the Earth

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 Carolinaa 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 seasonfrom 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.

Fred Bahnson is a permaculture gardener, a cofounder and former director of Anathoth Community Garden, coauthor of Making Peace With the Land, and the author of Soil and Sacrament. His essays have appeared in Oxford American, Image, The Sun, Christian Science Monitor, and Best American Spiritual Writing 2007. He is the recipient of a Kellogg Food & Community fellowship and a North Carolina Artist fellowship in Creative Nonfiction. He lives in western North Carolina and is the director of the Food, Faith, and Religious Leadership Initiative at Wake Forest University School of Divinity.