In a moving account of return to her roots in the Kentucky hills, bell hooks, well known speaker and author, describes the necessity and ambiguity of that place called "home." When she left the rural South she found material well-being but always felt out-of-place, a black country girl in the city. In many ways the home of her childhood was a place of oppression and violence, but at the same time the hills of Kentucky and the agrarian life were a place of safety and nurture. hooks suggests that "without the space to grow food, to commune with nature, or to mediate the starkness of poverty with the splendor of nature, black people experienced profound depression" (p. 38). Home in nature was a site of resistance, a place for healing, and communion with God. 

hooks calls African-Americans and all of us to think about the way we are shaped and held by the land. Rural churches will find in hooks' text a language for expressing the spiritual necessity of connection to the land and of a place of belonging that agrarian folks often already know intuitively. City churches may become more aware of the yearning for nature and disconnection from land. Longing for home, is in some sense a longing for God. Reading this book aroused that longing in me and at the same time filled me with a sense of belonging, of being at home with God.