Take This Bread, Sara Miles
Take This Bread, Sara Miles
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Take This Bread
A Radical Conversion

Author: Sara Miles

Narrator: Nicole Poole

Unabridged: 8 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/27/2016


Synopsis

Raised as an atheist, Sara Miles lived an enthusiastically secular life as a restaurant cook and a writer. Then early one winter morning, for no earthly reason, she wandered into a church. "I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian," she writes, "or, as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut." But she ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine, and found herself radically transformed.

A lesbian left-wing journalist who covered revolutions around the world, Miles was not the woman her friends expected to see suddenly praising Jesus. She was certainly not the kind of person the government had in mind to run a "faith-based charity." Religion for her was not about angels or good behavior or piety; it was about real hunger, real food, and real bodies. Before long, she turned the bread she ate at communion into tons of groceries, piled on the church's altar to be given away. The first food pantry she established provided hundreds of poor, elderly, sick, deranged, and marginalized people with lifesaving food and a sense of belonging. Within a few years, the loaves had multiplied, and she and the people she served had started nearly a dozen more pantries.

About Sara Miles

Sara Miles is the founder and director of The Food Pantry, and serves as Director of Ministry at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, California. She is also the author of City of God and Jesus Freak.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Angie

I didn't necessarily "enjoy" reading this book while I was actually reading it. I felt uncomfortable and challenged, not by the language but by some of the opinions and views. This author and I couldn't be more different, and I'm sure she'd strongly disapprove of my LDS religion (even the liberal wi......more

Goodreads review by John

In her introduction, Miles claims to have bridged the chasm between liberal Christianity and right-wing/fundamentalist Christianity. But what that amounts to, basically, is saying "hi" to a guy with a KJV in the front seat of his pickup. Otherwise, fundies play the one-dimensional role they usually......more

Goodreads review by Katelyn

So many mixed thoughts about this one. The first third of the book, detailing Miles's unlikely conversion to Christianity, was stunning. The embodied, radical hospitality of the food pantry she starts soon thereafter chastens most contemporary church in their too-common practice of drawing boundarie......more

Goodreads review by Laura

It's true. I'm a sucker for cover art. Tell me, how could I turn down book that uses Gothic typeface and an image of a cross made with a jelly sandwich on Wonder Bread? I was actually checking the library stacks for another memoir when this book caught my eye. It was a serendipitous discovery, as I'......more