Sara Miles

A provocative reflection on what it means to be Christian describes the author's offbeat journey of faith from cynical atheist to religious activist against hunger, recounting her establishment of food pantries that feed thousands of people and her dealings with battered women, child abusers, millionaires, day laborers, politicians, criminals, and religious leaders on her quest. 25,000 first printing.

A Radical Conversion

Take this Bread

“Mine is a personal story of an unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion, told by a very unlikely convert.” –Sara Miles 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. The mysterious sacrament of communion has sustained Miles ever since, in a faith she’d scorned, in work she’d never imagined. In this astonishing story, she tells how the seeds of her conversion were sown, and what her life has been like since she took that bread. 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. Take This Bread is rich with real-life Dickensian characters–church ladies, child abusers, millionaires, schizophrenics, bishops, and thieves–all blown into Miles’s life by the relentless force of her newfound calling. She recounts stories about trudging through the rain in housing projects, wiping the runny nose of a psychotic man, storing a battered woman’s .375 Magnum in a cookie tin. She writes about the economy of hunger and the ugly politics of food; the meaning of prayer and the physicality of faith. Here, in this achingly beautiful, passionate book, is the living communion of Christ. “The most amazing book.” – Anne Lamott

Take This Bread

Paradise is a garden...but heaven is a city. From the acclaimed author of Take This Bread and Jesus Freak comes a powerful new account of venturing beyond the borders of religion into the unpredictable territory of faith. On Ash Wednesday, 2012, Sara Miles and her friends left their church buildings and carried ashes to the buzzing city streets: the crowded dollar stores, beauty shops, hospital waiting rooms, street corners and fast-food joints of her neighborhood. They marked the foreheads of neighbors and strangers, sharing blessings with waitresses and drunks, believers and doubters alike. CITY OF GOD narrates the events of the day in vivid detail, exploring the profound implications of touching strangers with a reminder of common mortality. As the story unfolds, Sara Miles also reflects on life in her city over the last two decades, where the people of God suffer and rejoice, building community amid the grit and beauty of this urban landscape. CITY OF GOD is a beautifully written personal narrative, rich in complex, real-life characters, and full of the "wild, funny, joyful, raucous, reverent" moments of struggle and faith that have made Miles one of the most enthralling Christian writers of our time.

Faith in the Streets

City of God

The popular blogger, author of Take This Bread, and former atheist discusses the adventures of her recently-found faith and how she came to take God's commands literally in her everyday life and relationships.

Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead

Jesus Freak

City of God is a moving, prophetic account of the divine in daily life. It tells the story of one day in Sara’s ministry: Ash Wednesday, when she carries ashes out of church to public places. Sara explores the profound meanings set loose by touching the forehead of a stranger and paints an unforgettable picture of the search for God all around us.

Faith in the streets

Eric Rofes

This book brings the sex back into queer studies, making real bodies, acts, and desires central to any analysis of the complex relationships between male and female homosexualities and their impact on lesbian and gay culture. The contributors to this volume address the many ways in which lesbians and gay men are viewed and implicated in each other's sexual realities.

Sara Miles

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