Recounts the author's experiences founding a faith-based community garden in rural North Carolina, and emphasizes how growing one's own food can help readers reconnect with the land and divine faith.

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. A POWERFUL, PERSONAL STORY OF HOW GROWING AND SHARING FOOD PULLS US CLOSER TO GOD Like many seekers of the authentic life, Fred Bahnson sought answers to big questions like What does it mean to follow God? and How should I live my life? But after divinity school at Duke, Bahnson began to find answers not in a pulpit, but at the handle of a plow. After his agrarian conversion, Bahnson started a faith-based community garden in rural North Carolina to help its members grow real food and to feed his own spiritual hunger. Soil and Sacrament tells the story of how Bahnson and people of faith all over America are re-rooting themselves in the land, reconnecting with their food and each other, and praying with their very lives the prayer of the early Christian monks: “We beg you, make us truly alive.” Through his journeys to four different faith communities—Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, and Jewish—Bahnson explores the con­nections between spiritual nourishment and the way we feed our bodies with the sensitivity, personal knowledge, and insight shared by Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben. Soil and Sacrament is a book about communion in its deepest sense—an inspiring and joyful meditation on what grows above the earth, beneath it, and inside each one of us.

Agriculturalist Fred Bahnson and theologian Norman Wirzba develop a vision for community renewal based on reconciliation with the land. With a balance of theological and practical insight, the authors lead communities into practices of local food production, eucharistic eating and delight in God?s provision.

God is reconciling all things in heaven and on earth. We are alienated not only from one another, but also from the land that sustains us. Our ecosystems are increasingly damaged, and human bodies are likewise degraded. Most of us have little understanding of how our energy is derived or our food is produced, and many of our current industrialized practices are both unhealthy for our bodies and unsustainable for the planet. Agriculturalist Fred Bahnson and theologian Norman Wirzba declare that in Christ, God reconciles all bodies into a peaceful, life-promoting relationship with one another. Because human beings are incarnated in material, bodily existence, we are necessarily interdependent with plants and animals, land and sea, heaven and earth. The good news is that redemption is cosmic, with implications for agriculture and ecology, from farm to dinner table. Bahnson and Wirzba describe communities that model cooperative practices of relational life, with local food production, eucharistic eating and delight in God's provision. Reconciling with the land is a rich framework for a new way of life. Read this book to start down the path to restoring shalom and experiencing Jesus' kingdom of shared abundance, where neighbors are fed and all receive enough.

The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, which survives in a single sixteenth-century copy, dramatizes the physical abuse by five Muhammad-worshipping Syrian Jews of a Host, the bread consecrated by a priest during the Christian Mass. The text is the work of a playwright possessed of a tremendous theatrical imagination, notwithstanding his choice of subject matter.

We are, at our base, humus-beings. Our lives are dependent upon the soil and we flourish when we live in this reality. Unfortunately, we have been a part of a centuries-long push to build a new tower of Babel--an attempt to escape our basic dependence on the dirt. This escape has resulted in ecological disaster, unhealthy bodies, and broken communities. In answer to this denial, a habit of mind formed from working close with the soil offers us a way of thinking and seeing that enables us to see the world as it really is. This way of thinking is called agrarianism. In Cultivating Reality, Ragan Sutterfield guides us through the agrarian habit of mind and shows Christians how a theological return to the soil will enliven us again to the joys of creatureliness.

Biretta Books is proud to present this masterwork of the great Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen! These Are the Sacraments is a lucidly written presentation of the seven Sacraments of the Catholic Church. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen is responsible for this memorable and dramatic book which defines the meanings of the Sacraments to man, their power, and their application. In his text, Bishop Sheen skillfully describes the elements particular to each Sacrament, defining the matter and form necessary for valid administration.