Making Peace with the Land: God's Call to Reconcile with Creation

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).

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.

This book reminds us of the resources--scriptural, scientific and human--that we have as we try to write a new story, one that emphasizes the need for people to back off, to allow the planet to operate on its own (God's) terms instead of ours. It's a rich book, which is appropriate, since this is a rich and beautiful world.
-From the foreword by Bill McKibben

Bahnson and Wirzba have written a compelling summons to food repentance. They call us away from the long-term unsustainable bubble of food in the orbit of fossil fuel. They urge return to the quotidian reality of soil, fresh tomatoes, the daily work of gardening, and realism about the source of food. Their accessible, anecdotal style adds force to the critical bite of their invitation toward life-giving, life-sustaining food.
-Walter Brueggemann,
Columbia Theological Seminary

Making Peace with the Land offers a powerful vision of God as a gardener, physically engaged in the work of restoring all creation to wholeness. And it offers hungry people a way to join in God's work by getting our hands dirty. This is a book about communion in its deepest sense.
-Sara Miles,
founder of The Food Pantry

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

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

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

In Genesis, God entrusts the care of his good creation to humanity, commanding us to rule it as his vice-regents--which means careful stewardship, not consumeristic exploitation. Determining the difference between the two is sometimes difficult. But with the guidance of prayer, Scripture, and books life Making Peace with the Land, we might find the search for wisdom less difficult than we first thought.
-Jake Meador,
Christianity Today, June 2012

"This book was written to equip all of God's people to be more faithful ambassadors of reconciliation in regard to the land. . . . Many Christians need to learn again how to live sacramentally in 'God's garden.' This book provides the biblical vision along with down-to-earth examples that can help make this happen."

J. David Holland, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Volume 65, Number 1, March 2013

"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

"Fred Bahson and Norman Wirzba are competent guides to this complicated, urgent subject. Too often, readers are hammered with statistics that, while true, tend to confuse and overwhelm. In this case, however, statistics are absolutely necessary and are used judiciously--in no small measure because of the high level of expertise of both authors."

John Nyquist, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 36, No. 4

Bahnson and Wirzba have written a book that is thoroughly Christian, offering inspiration to many of us who seek to understand what on earth (literally) God would have us do. But the book's apologetic value cannot be underestimated. It unfolds theriches of Christian teaching, tradition, experience, and reflection that makes it accessible to those outside the faith. They drive all of us to consider the actual ancient stumbling blocks of Jesus' humanity and his bodily resurrection, and they offer hope."

Rusty Pritchard, PRISM Magazine, September/October 2012