Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion

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Random House Publishing Group, 2008 M11 19 - 320 páginas
“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

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Chapter
10
Chapter 4
24
Chapter 6
54
Chapter 8
74
Chapter 9
91
Chapter 11
109
Chapter 12
119
Chapter 14
141
Chapter 15
159
Chapter 17
179
Chapter 18
198
Chapter 20
218
Chapter 22
242
Chapter 24
261
Acknowledgments
281
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Página 6 - Waft, waft, ye winds, his story, And you, ye waters, roll, Till, like a sea of glory, It spreads from pole to pole; Till...
Página 3 - From Greenland's icy mountains ; From India's coral strand ; Where Afric's sunny fountains Roll down their golden sand ; From many an ancient river ; From many a palmy plain ; They call us to deliver Their land from error's chain.
Página 79 - And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me." In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.
Página 224 - O Lord our God, King of the Universe] who brings forth bread from the earth.
Página 235 - Make their life together a sign of Christ's love to this sinful and broken world, that unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy conquer despair.
Página 86 - defined in these surveys as people who said they have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life today and who also indicated they believe that when they die they will go to Heaven because they had confessed their sins and had accepted Jesus Christ as their savior.
Página 86 - Christ lived a sinless life on earth; and describing God as the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it...
Página 83 - James, and then to all the apostles; -and last of all he appeared to me too; it was as though I was born when no one expected it...
Página 86 - Christ that is still important in [his or her] life today," and agree that "when I die, I will go to Heaven because I have confessed my sins and have accepted Jesus Christ as my savior.

Acerca del autor (2008)

Sara Miles is the author of How to Hack a Party Line: The Democrats and Silicon Valley and co-editor of Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan and the anthology Opposite Sex: Gay Men on Lesbians, Lesbians on Gay Men. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Progressive, La Jornada, and Salon, among others. She has written extensively on military affairs, politics, and culture. She lives in San Francisco with her family. Visit the her website at www.saramiles.net.

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