Jesus, Bread, and Chocolate: Crafting a Handmade Faith in a Mass-Market World

The good news without additives
 It’s happening everywhere we look: the industrial, the synthetic, and the mass-produced are making way for the artisanal, the organic, and the small-batch. We care about how things are made. We want to invest in our neighbor, not a distant executive. We choose to spend more for responsibly produced, locally sold, higher quality chocolate than for the Hershey bar we enjoyed a few years ago.
 The popularity of farmers markets, bakery bread, house concerts, craft-brewed beer, and boutique coffee shops reflects this renewed interest in important premodern ethics, but is there a deeper truth here to be discovered by people of faith? Might these distinctly earthy things possess a uniquely biblical flavor amidst a culture of automation and excess?