'How can we live with hope in the midst of a deeply wounded world? In prose as lucid in style as it is illuminating in content, Norman Wirzba's This Sacred Life builds a patient, forceful and elegant case that knowing where we are is crucial to understanding both who we are as human beings and how we are to live in ways that nourish our own being together with that of the world that sustains us. Drawing on biology, ecology, anthropology, economics and psychology as well as theology to show how our lives are densely interwoven with the well-being of soil, air and water, he provides an arresting vision of the gift such a rooted and entangled life can be.' Ian A. McFarland, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Theology, Candler School of Theology, and Quondam Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge