By Bread Alone: A Baker’s Reflections on Hunger, Longing, and the Goodness of God
about the book:
Bread is central to God’s story, and to your story too.
Our spiritual lives are deeply connected to bread―the bread we break with family and friends and the Bread that is Christ’s Body, given and broken for us. It’s easy to choose the cheapest, most convenient option, but the life of Jesus and the story of Scripture, as well as the substance of bread itself, shows us that there is more. In By Bread Alone, Kendall Vanderslice, a professional baker and practical theologian who spends her days elbow-deep in dough, reveals that there is no food more spiritually significant than bread―whether eating, baking, sharing, or breaking.
Kendall has struggled with hunger ever since she can remember―hunger for bread, yes, but also for community and for the ability to “taste and see” the goodness of God. She knows the tension of bread as blessing and bread as burden but has learned that bread also offers a unique opportunity to heal our relationship to the body of Christ and to our own bodies. In By Bread Alone, she weaves her own faith-filled journey together with original recipes and stories about the role of bread in church history, revealing a God who draws near to us and creatively provides for our daily needs.
When words fail, when we cry out in longing and loneliness, when God feels impossibly far away, By Bread Alone displays the tangible expression of God’s presence and provision for us in the form of bread. It’s the story of hunger and family, of friendship and unmet longing. It’s the story of a God who meets us in both sacred and mundane ways. In the mixing and kneading, in the waiting and partaking, may God also meet you.
“This book, which is both a series of meditations and a collection of touching stories about her own journey of self-discovery, perfectly captures the symbiotic back-and-forth of how the baker and the making of the bread transform each other.
How does transformation occur? Read on to find out."
-Peter Reinhart, award winning author of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and Bread Revolution
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What others have said about By Bread Alone:
“I am grateful for Kendall Vanderslice’s By Bread Alone--a sustenance of hope, a needed nourishment for us hungering to create beauty faced with the bitter gaps of our divided cultures. Her words give rise to our tenderness, and her memorable chapters fill our hearts with compassion, Every page of this book (full of recipes) is brimming with refractive colors shone through the broken prisms of her life, a communion journey of service in tears, as a sojourner baker, a fellow maker into the aroma of the New.”
- Makoto Fujimura, artist and author of Art + Faith: A Theology of Making
“By Bread Alone is a soulful, searching glimpse at trusting the goodness of God when it seems most opaque. Kendall Vanderslice trades toxic positivity for the promise of sustenance and the result is deeply honest and curiously comforting. These pages are dusted with the flour of daily bread. If you are lost, longing, hope-weary or barely hanging-on (aren’t we all?) read this and be nourished.”
- Shannan Martin, author of The Ministry of Ordinary Places and Start with Hello
"In this deeply personal account, baker theologian Kendall Vanderslice, explores how baking bread can become a lens through which we understand the Eucharist anew and what it means to allow God to form our lives into a living sacrifice for the life of the world. Be moved, touched and inspired as you journey with Vanderslice into the world of artisan bread, embodiment and what it means to fully embrace your vocation.”
- Gisela Kreglinger, PhD, author of The Spirituality of Wine and The Soul of Wine
“Kendall Vanderslice's memoir By Bread Alone provides a refreshing perspective on the intersection of faith and food. Vanderslice eloquently uses her baking expertise and experience to poignantly remind us that the simple acts of making, breaking, and eating bread have profound theological implications.”
- Adrian Miller, James Beard Award winner and Executive Director of the Colorado Council of Churches
“By Bread Alone is a powerful invitation into the rhythms of baking and the rhythms of faith. As Vanderslice explains, these are complex journeys of nuance and transformation that mirror one another. Through a robust exploration of breadmaking and her own story, Kendall vulnerably and insightfully offers an alternative to the “Wonder Bread theology” that often plagues the church. This book nourishes and satisfies our deepest longings for The Bread of Life. ”
- Kat Armas, author of Abuelita Faith and host of The Protagonistas podcast
“By Bread Alone is a tender and vulnerable story of Kendall's search to be satisfied by God's provision for her given life. A memoir about what it means to be hungry, what it means to be filled, and what it means to not always get what you desire. I loved this book and needed it myself. Every woman who has struggled to love and learn and lean into their body, while still looking with hope toward their resurrected body, needs this book.”
- Lore Ferguson Wilbert, author of A Curious Faith and Handle With Care
