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Making Peace with the Land: God's Call to Reconcile with Creation, By Fred Bahnson and Norman Wirzba

Making Peace with the Land

God's Call to Reconcile with Creation

Resources for Reconciliation

by Fred Bahnson and Norman Wirzba
Foreword by Bill McKibben

Making Peace with the Land
Paperback
$22.99
  • Length: 182 pages
  • Dimensions: 5.5 × 8.25 in
  • Published: March 22, 2012
  • Imprint: IVP
  • ISBN: 9780830834570
Other Formats:

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 thatin 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 andearth. 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 fedand all receive enough.

REVIEWS

"When Mary turned from the empty tomb and mistook Jesus for a gardener, it was no mistake: Jesus is the new Adam. Thank you, Fred and Norman, for reminding us of our Genesis 2:15 responsibility to tend and protect the Garden, this earth, and calling each of us to the good work of living peaceably with the land."Nancy Sleeth, cofounder, Blessed Earth, and author of Almost Amish
"This series is on reconciliation, which is at the heart of the Christian faith. One of the early Christians said there are three dimensions to the cross--the vertical, which is about reconciliation with God; the horizontal, which is about reconciliation to other humans; and finally the cross is firmly planted into the earth, which calls us to reconcile with creation. That final dimension is perhaps the most neglected one of all in the piles of books on faith. I am deeply thankful for this addition to the library. We all just got smarter."Shane Claiborne, author, activist and recovering sinner, www.thesimpleway.org
"I cannot think of another book on making peace with the earth that does so much in so few pages--grounding its case with theological care, describing the causes of 'ecological amnesia' so clearly that they are impossible to disown and offering a vision of practical response that appeals to hope instead of guilt, and all of this while telling stories that make the book difficult to put down! Here is a book for anyone who is ready to trade ecological despair for practical action, in the company of two men who know what it means to be 'married to the land.'"Barbara Brown Taylor, author of An Altar in the World
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CONTENTS

Series Preface
Foreword by Bill McKibben
Prologue: For God So Loved the Soil . . .
1. Reconciliation with the Land
2. Learning to See
3. Reconciliation Through Christ
4. Field, Table, Communion: The Abundant KingdomVersus the Abundant Mirage
5. Reconciliation Through Eating
6. Bread for the Whole Body of Christ
Epilogue: . . . So We Can Eat from the Tree of Life
Acknowledgments
Recommendations for Further Reading
Study Guide
Notes
About the Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation
About Resources for Reconciliation

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BONUS MATERIAL

Download the Press Kit.

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ABOUT Fred Bahnson

Fred Bahnson

Fred Bahnson is a permaculture gardener, a pioneer in church-supported agriculture, and an award-winning poet and essayist. Bahnson is the director of the Food and Faith initiative at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. Formerly, he wasa Kellogg Food Society policy fellow at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and the cofounder and former director of Anathoth Community Garden in Cedar Grove, North Carolina. Bahnson is a contributor to the University Press of Kentuckybook Wendell Berry and Religion edited by Joel Shuman and the author of the forthcoming Free Press book Soil and Sacrament: Four Seasons Among the Keepers of the Earth. His essay "Climbing the Sphinx" was featured in Best American Spiritual Writing 2007 edited by Philip Zaleski.

ABOUT Norman Wirzba

Norman Wirzba

Norman Wirzba (Ph.D., Loyola University Chicago) is research professor of theology, ecology and rural life at Duke Divinity School. He holds memberships in the American Academy of Religion, the Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology and the International Association for Environmental Philosophy. Wirzba is the author of Food and Faith (Cambridge), Living the Sabbath (Cambridge) and The Paradise of God (Oxford) as well as numerous reviews and articles, including "Agrarianism After Modernity: An Opening for Grace" in After Modernity? Secularity, Globalization, and the Re-Enchantment of the World (Baylor).

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