Bob and Chris sit down with baker and writer Kendall Vanderslice for a special Thanksgiving episode of RTN Theology centered on food, faith, and a movement of church communities built around the table. Vanderslice’s 2019 book, We Will Feast (Eerdman’s) is a veritable buffet in its own right: part journalism, part food studies, part memoir, and part sacramental theology. Lastly, we’re treated to a perfect sweet treat: music from Nashville musician Sandra McCracken’s Psalms, We Will Feast in the House of Zion. Happy feasting!

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The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by Robert Farrar Capon

Priest, chef, and NYT columnist Capon at his quirky best. Amid actual recipes and quips about humorless church folk, are deeply beautiful and theologically intricate observations about what it means to be a creature made by a Creator with the desire and faculties to “taste and see that the Lord is good!”

Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture by Ellen F. Davis

Luminary Old Testament scholar, Ellen Davis, crafts a theology around God’s people’s relationship to and vocation for the Land woven throughout the bible.

Take This Bread by Sara Miles

This “spiritual memoir of a twenty-first-century Christian,” like most of our lives, is centered around various tables and meals. 

Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition by Christine Pohl

Dr. Pohl’s survey has been important in renewing and recovering hospitality in and around Christian communities. Fundamentally, God makes room for us, and any participation in that Divine Hospitality

For the Life of the World by Alexander Schmemann

The gold standard of accessible sacramental theology. Fr. Schmemann’s Eastern Orthodox perspective opens up profound possibilities for how the Physical is in itself a Spiritual means of grace.

Eat with Joy by Rachel Marie Stone

A fantastic introduction to how central food is to faith, whether you knew it or not.

We Will Feast: Rethinking Dinner, Worship, & the Community of God by Kendall Vanderslice

Vanderslice’s tour of dinner churches around the country create lovingly crafted portraits of communities gathered around the Table to witness to God’s grace and counter cultural forces like consumption, loneliness, and polarization.

Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life by Tish Harrison Warren

Using historic sacraments and spiritual practices as a frame, Rev. Warren reimagines common daily activities as rote and seemingly unimportant as waking up, quibbling with a spouse, or losing your keys as possibilities of remembrance and encounter with the Divine.

Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating by Norman Wirzba

Professor Wirzba writes about Food, Creation, and Sabbath the way fellow Canadian Gordon Lightfoot writes about the Edmund Fitzgerald, with understated sophistication and the sort of interest and melody that has his subject tumbling around in your thoughts long after the song is finished.

Episode edited by Bob Crawford.