Tasting God

In southern Appalachia, a priest discovers that the road to heaven runs through the kitchen.

The road to heaven, Robert Farrar Capon wrote, doesn’t run from the world but through it. In Tasting God, Alex Sosler takes that conviction seriously, leading readers through soil and seed, bread and wine, and the meals we share with neighbors.

Part theological meditation, part love letter to Asheville, this book invites readers to the shared table of southern Appalachia—a region that has long resisted the flattening logic of industrial agriculture. Sosler introduces us to the gardeners, seed-keepers, millers, foragers, chefs, and winemakers who are quietly tending a different kind of economy—one rooted in affection rather than extraction, abundance rather than scarcity, neighborliness rather than mobility.

Drawing on Wendell Berry’s agrarian wisdom, Norman Wirzba’s theology of eating, and Capon’s sacramental imagination, Sosler argues that mysticism begins with a meal. Every bite traces a genesis back to soil, and back to the God who calls creation good. Here is a book for anyone hungry not just for better food but for a more rooted, grateful, and hopeful way of being at home in the world.

Taste and see.