"Sutterfield not only educates about birds; he shows how to think with birds. Ancient monks, distinguished theologians, and nature philosophers ride along with him on his feathered explorations into nature's rhythms and rituals."

-Trish O'Kane, author of Birding to Change the World

"I feel like I have glimpsed something of God in the azure flash of a tiny indigo bunting and the sublime grandeur of a bald eagle's gaze. In this wise and inviting book, Sutterfield helps us understand the wondrous intersection of Creator and creation in these beings who defy gravity. Read this book to learn how to listen and look for feathered companions who teach us to lift up our hearts."

-James K. A. Smith, Calvin University, author of How to Inhabit Time and Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark

"Through birding and its myriad of challenges and delights, Ragan Sutterfield guides us in patient attention and persistent hope, helping us listen to 'a quiet world ready to speak' and, in so doing, open ourselves anew to the voice of God."

-Courtney Ellis, author of Looking Up: A Birder's Guide to Hope Through Grief

"For anyone who has been curious about birdwatching, Ragan Sutterfield's lyrical love letter to this pastime is a wonderful place to start."

-Katelyn Beaty, author, editor, and lifelong birdwatcher

"How should a Christian think-and feel-about creation? Is it something to be transcended, or embraced-or something else entirely? In this highly readable, important, and deeply rooted book, Ragan Sutterfield opens the Christian imagination to a vision of a God both transcendent and immanent, an incarnational Father entwined in the mud and dirt and beauty and death of his creation. This book teaches Christians how to get their hands dirty-and why they should."

-Paul Kingsnorth, author of Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist

"Weaving together reflections on the soil, the biblical story, farming, compost, and our hope for the healing of creation, Ragan Sutterfield has created an allusive and poetic symphony of gratitude, awe, and solidarity with and for the soil and ourselves as creatures. This book evocatively and compellingly invites us to join the dance of all of creation, so that we, who are intimately bound with the soil, might become more deeply rooted in the life of the Creator."

-Sylvia C. Keesmaat, founder, Bible Remixed

“Sutterfield’s book is full of practical wisdom not just for those interested in Berry or agrarianism but for anyone interested in living a sane life. This is a compelling and transformative read.”

—William T. Cavanaugh, DePaul University

“This collection of essays offers a reliable map to Berry’s thought and life, beautifully distilled into a dozen keystone convictions.”

—Ched Myers, author, Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice

“This wide-ranging yet coherent introduction to Berry’s work offers also a view of Christian life that engages the deepest threats to our humanity and our physical world, and at the same time provides concrete guidance for the patient practice of hope.”

—Ellen F. Davis, Amos Ragan Kearns Professor of Bible and Practical Theology, The Divinity School, Duke University

“In Wendell Berry and the Given Life, Ragan Sutterfield has gotten to the spiritual core of Berry’s work and elegantly introduced it to people of faith.”

—C. Christopher Smith, founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books and coauthor of Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

"I honestly don't think there is a book out there that is quite so brave and honest about the complex, pain-filled, and beautiful experience so many of us have with our bodies as this one.  I applaud Ragan Sutterfield for bringing to the light what has for so long been hiding in the dark"

—Nadia Bolz-Weber, author of Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
 

"Ragan has learned from experience what our best poets have been telling us--that the key to being human in our time is a "recovered body." That the "soft animal of your body" will teach you, like the wild geese, if you give it your attention. What Ragan makes so beautifully clear is how Jesus longs to love and redeem us in and through our bodies. This Is My Body is a memoir that threatens to up-end spiritual writing in the 21st century."

—Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, author of Strangers at My Door: A True Story of Finding Jesus in Unexpected Guests

“In this wonder-filled book Ragan Sutterfield draws our attention back to a faith where our embodied life is inseparable from our spiritual life."

—Fred Bahnson, author of Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food & Faith
 

"Like tenacious alfalfa roots, which reach deep into the ground and transfer essential nutrients to the soil's surface, Ragan Sutterfield digs deep into the subsoil of agrarian thought, Christian faith, and his own experience as a farmer, and brings up life-giving nourishment for all to share. In this world of smartphones and dumbed-down culture, Cultivating Reality points us toward those habits of mind that deepen our relationship with the world, with God, and with each other. Here's to 'the priesthood of all farmers' and 'the farmerhood of all peoples.' Take this book, and eat."

—Fred Bahnson, author of Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food & Faith

"Sutterfield wants to cure our rapacious apathy toward reality by infecting us with an agrarian mind. His comprehensive argument exposes just how fantastical it is to ignore food and farming as matters of faith. Like farming, this book is also 'a dance of effort and grace'—at once conservingly creative, strenuously imaginative, a disciplined and artful cultivation of our capacity to recognize with equal clarity the idols eviscerating us and the gifts by which we are sustained."

—D. Brent Laytham, Dean of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology, St. Mary's Seminary