cover image Soil and Sacrament: Food, Faith, and Growing Heaven on Earth

Soil and Sacrament: Food, Faith, and Growing Heaven on Earth

Fred Bahnson. Simon & Schuster, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4516-6330-3

Bahnson (Making Peace with the Land) is outstanding in his field. Now director of the Food, Faith, and Religious Leadership Initiative at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Bahnson has spent a lot of time in a lot of fields. He developed his field studies into essays of depth and inspiration, humility and, yes, frustration, for he is dealing with the earth and the fullness—or dratted emptiness—thereof. More specifically, he deals with soil (not dirt), a living organism that “both craves life and wants to produce more life, even a hundredfold.” With Christians, he plants in Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina at Advent, plows the Lord’s Acre in North Carolina at Eastertide, and fertilizes Tierra Nueva in Washington State at Pentecost; with Jews, he harvests during Sukkot at Adamah Farm in Connecticut. Like Anne Lamott’s spiritual writing, Bahnson’s essays introduce people of deep faith, imprisoned pasts, ticklish humor, and hope-filled vision, farmer/priests being church by feeding the hungry and praying in the dirt. Agent: Wendy Sherman, Wendy Sherman Associates Literary Management. (Aug. 6)