Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher.

Acknowledgments -- Preface -- Chapter One: Sustainable Religion, Sustainable Ethics?; Taking Stock: Why This Project?; Religion, the Environment, and the United States; Theory and Method: Lived Religion; Theory and Method: Network Theory; Theory and Method: Grounded Theory; Religious Agrarian Communities; Why Religious Values?; Why Study Food?; Why Study Farming?; Industrial Agriculture/Farming; Sustainable Agriculture/Farming; Sustainable Agriculture: Land Health; Sustainable Worldview: Community Health and the Local

Sustainable Worldview: Spiritual Health; Sustainable Worldview: Ecology/Natural Systems; The Return of "Place"; Sustainable Versus Industrial Agriculture; Whither Agrarianism?; Religious Agrarianism -- Chapter Two: Koinonia and Christian Religious Agrarianism; Lay of the Land; A Demonstration Plot for God; Clarence Jordan; Koinonia in the 1960s; Koinonia From the 1970s Through the 1980s; Koinonia in the 1990s; Koinonia in the 2000s Through Today; Koinonia's Current Structure and Vision; New Monasticism and Schools for Conversion

The Agrarian Example of Koinonia; A Brief History of Christian Farming; Ecological Ethics, Sustainability, and Christianity -- Chapter Three: Hazon and Jewish Religious Agrarianism; The Spirit of Adamah; Politics and Judaism in the United States; Judaism, Ecology, and Relationships with the Land; Jewish Agrarianism in the United States; Jewish Environmental Thought; A US Jewish Vision of Transformation; Shearith Israel; Lived Jewish Farming Networks -- Chapter Four: The Local ([Farm] Land); Localizing Agrarianism; Religion, Ethics, and Land

Bioregional Thought about the Land; Taking a Stand in, on, and of the Land; Jewish Values and Practices about the Land; Fresh and Local; Local Health; Hazon and the Local; Christian Values and Practices about the Land; The Sacredness of Local Creation; Designing Locality; Demonstrating Permaculture on a Local Scale; Farming Practices that Benefit the Local; Hazon; Koinonia; The Local: Coda -- Chapter Five: Concepts of Health; From Soil to Bodies, Health Matters; Human Health; Spiritual Health; Physical Health

Farm Health; Societal Health; Animal and Soil Health; Planetary Health -- Chapter Six: Justice for All: From Soil to Worker, from Individual to Community; A Concern for Justice; Politics and Food; Justice in the Future -- Chapter Seven: Conclusion: A Harvest of Ideas; A Changing Landscape (of Farmlands and Religious Studies); Revisiting the "Religion" in Religious Agrarianism; Place/s, Boundaries, Resilience, and Ecophenomenology: New Futures for Religion; Closing Arguments -- Appendix -- Notes -- References

Examines religious communities as advocates of environmental stewardship and sustainable agriculture practices. Writing at the interface of religion and nature theory, US religious history, and environmental ethics, Todd LeVasseur presents the case for the emergence of a nascent "religious agrarianism" within certain subsets of Judaism and Christianity in the United States. Adherents of this movement, who share an environmental concern about the modern industrial food economy and a religiously grounded commitment to the values of locality, health, and justice, are creating new models for sustainable agrarian lifeways and practices. LeVasseur explores this greening of US religion through an extensive engagement with the scholarly literature on lived religion, network theory, and grounded theory, as well as through ethnographic case studies of two intentional communities at the vanguard of this movement: Koinonia Farm, an ecumenical Christian lay monastic community, and Hazon, a progressive Jewish environmental group. Todd LeVasseur teaches religious studies and environmental and sustainability studies at the College of Charleston. He is the coeditor (with Pramod Parajuli and Norman Wirzba) of Religion and Sustainable Agriculture: World Spiritual Traditions and Food Ethics and the coeditor (with Anna Peterson) of Religion and Ecological Crisis: The "Lynn White Thesis" at Fifty.