Fred Bahnson is the co-founder and former director of Anathoth Community Garden, a ministry of Cedar Grove UMC in Orange County, North Carolina. During his four years as director Fred helped turn a five-acre piece of land into a thriving community center. Anathoth is now a place that teaches sustainable food production, hosts regular community meals, and helps deepen relationships between God, neighbor, and the land. Fred speaks and writes widely about food and faith, covering everything from the theological and scriptural understandings of food to practical examples of how such beliefs are embodied in everyday practices. He is especially interested in churches and Christian organizations that engage the world through sustainable agriculture, both in the U.S. and abroad. His writing has appeared in Orion, The Sun, Sojourners, Pilgrimage, The Cresset, Christian Century, and the anthologies Best American Spiritual Writing 2007 (Mariner) and Wendell Berry and Religion: Heaven's Earthly Life (University Press of Kentucky). Awards include the 2006 Pilgrimage Essay Award, a 2008 Associated Church Press Award of Excellence, and a 2008 William Raney scholarship in nonfiction at Bread Loaf Writer's Conference.  Fred has spent a combined four years of his life in other countries: he was a missionary kid in Nigeria, taught college courses on liberation theology and indigenous resistance in Mexico, Honduras, and Bolivia, and worked as a peaceworker among indigenous coffee farmers in Chiapas, Mexico. He lives on a small farm in western North Carolina with his wife and three sons, and is at work on a book called Soil & Sacrament: Four Seasons Among the Keepers of the Earth, forthcoming from Free Press (Simon & Schuster).