Fred Bahnson
Fred Bahnson is an award-winning journalist, author, documentary film producer, and the Chief Executive Officer of the National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT), where he leads NCAT’s mission to help people build resilient communities through local and sustainable solutions that reduce poverty, strengthen self-reliance, and protect natural resources.
He is the author of SOIL & SACRAMENT: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith, which environmentalist Bill McKibben described as “profoundly, beautifully down to earth, which is almost certainly where we all need to spend more time on a planet in crisis.” Soil & Sacrament tells the story of Anathoth Community Garden, a congregation-supported agriculture project co-founded by Fred in the North Carolina Piedmont, and follows Fred’s journey into the spirituality of food and farming. His writing has been published in Harper’s, Christian Science Monitor, Oxford American, Orion, The Sun, Notre Dame Magazine, Emergence, and Best American Travel Writing.
In collaboration with documentary filmmaker Jeremy Seifert, he wrote and produced “Horizons,” a film about climate change seen through the eyes of nature writer Barry Lopez. Recently, he co-directed “The Forest Beyond,” a film about a young Shipibo woman’s journey to find the retreating edge of her ancestral forests in the Peruvian Amazon.
Fred has shared his work with a wide variety of audiences including sustainable agriculture conferences, universities like Yale, Princeton and Georgetown, TEDx Manhattan’s “Changing the Way We Eat,” and the 2019 Halki Summit in Istanbul, where he spoke on climate change before an international gathering of faith leaders convened by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. He is also the founder and former director of the Food, Health, and Ecological Well-being Program at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity.
His awards and fellowships include a W.K. Kellogg Food & Society Policy fellowship, a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting grant, an Artist fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council, and a Religion and Environment Story Project fellowship from Boston University.
Fred works at the intersection of regenerative agriculture, social equity, and climate advocacy, with a focus on building collaborative partnerships between nonprofits, universities, faith communities, and philanthropies.
“Tri-Faith Initiative hosted a presentation by and conversation with Fred Bahnson that was one of the best, most informative and thought-provoking Zoom events I’ve seen.” – Faith Matters Series Audience Member
“Soil and Sacrament is a journey of return toward the founding Christian fact: spiritual life is not divorced from natural life, it is natural life bowing to an extra-natural, life-giving, never-ending miracle.” – David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and The River Why
“This is a very moving as well as a wonderfully intelligent meditation on what is involved in care for our earth. Fred Bahnson succeeds in showing how our practices of cultivating the environment and producing our food can become an integral part of a ‘gospel for all creation.’ In a culture obsessed with both growth and control, his spiritual insight is a gentle but clear challenge.” – Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury
“This is a spiritual memoir with real dirt under its fingernails, as deep and gritty and rich as well-tended soil—or Holy Scripture. Fred Bahnson’s vision matters, and the work he writes so beautifully and unsentimentally about has the power to change communities. An important and moving book.” – Sara Miles, author of Take This Bread and City of God
“Like Anne Lamott’s spiritual writing, Bahnson’s essays introduce people of deep faith, imprisoned pasts, ticklish humor, and hope-filled vision, farmer/priests being church by feeding the hungry and praying in the dirt.” – Publishers Weekly
Books, Films & Projects
Clips
Soil & Sacrament: Fred Bahnson at TEDxManhattan
Fred Bahnson on the sacred relationship between food and faith, and our responsibility to care for the land.
Fred Bahnson on the connection between food, the environment and spirituality.
On the Road with Thomas Merton: Fred Bahnson reads his award-winning essay.
News
In pursuit of a contemplative inner life amid a world in upheaval, Fred Bahnson meditates on maintaining an attentive heart. Read – or listen to – his essay, Keeping the World in Being: Meditations on Longing, in Emergence Magazine.
Spirituality & Health Magazine spoke to Fred Bahnson about the limits of activism and what an earthier Christianity might look like. Read How an Earthier Christianity Might Save Us: An Interview with Fred Bahnson.