First Thursdays at the Farm — A Distinctive Dining Series

May 2 | Carolyn Finney and Chef Joe Rocchi

Black Faces, White Spaces: African Americans’ Representation in the Great Outdoors

Carolyn Finney, PhD is a storyteller, author and cultural geographer who is deeply interested in issues related to identity, difference, creativity, and resilience.The aim of her work is to develop greater cultural competency within environmental organizations and institutions, challenge media outlets on their representation of difference, and increase awareness of how privilege shapes who gets to speak to environmental issues and determine policy and action. Carolyn is grounded in both artistic and intellectual ways of knowing – she pursued an acting career for eleven years, but five years of backpacking trips through Africa and Asia, and living in Nepal changed the course of her life. Motivated by these experiences, Carolyn returned to school after a 15-year absence to complete a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Canon National Parks Science Scholar, and received a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Environmental Studies. Her first book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors was released in 2014 (UNC Press). She is an artist-in-residence and the Environmental Studies Professor of Practice in the Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury College.

June 6 | Eric Barreto and Chef Jesse Jones

Made with Love: Theology, Identity and the Table

Eric D. Barreto, MDiv '04, is the Frederick and Margaret L. Weyerhaeuser Associate Professor of New Testament. As a Baptist minister, Barreto has pursued scholarship for the sake of the church, and he regularly writes for and teaches in faith communities around the country. He has also been a leader in the Hispanic Theological Initiative Consortium, a national, ecumenical, and inter-constitutional consortium comprised of some of the top seminaries, theological schools, and religion departments in the country. He is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature and the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion.

July 11 | Charles Rosen and Chef Gabby Aron

The Earth is Not a Warehouse: Practicing Regenerative Agriculture

Charles Rosen spent nearly 14 years working in advertising, then went on to run for Congress, started a global fund to finance the campaigns of women politicians abroad, and founded a hard cider brand, Ironbound Hard Cider. He is now the founder and CEO of Ironbound Farm, home to Ironbound Hard Cider and New Ark Farms, in Asbury, New Jersey. He founded Ironbound around a simple yet radical idea: that his company could make a quality product while also healing the environment, mending the social fabric, and treating its workers, suppliers, and customers with dignity—and that Ironbound Hard Cider would be successful because of the way it does business, not in spite of it. To that end, Ironbound is committed to creating well-paying jobs for the chronically underemployed, using regenerative farming practices, paying a fair price for local ingredients, and using only fresh-pressed apples grown in New Jersey and neighboring states.

August 1 | Heath Carter and Chef James Graham

Seeds of Discord: Christianity, Democracy, and Our Present Crisis

Heath W. Carter is associate professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he teaches and writes about the intersection of Christianity and American public life. He is currently working on a new book entitled On Earth as it is in Heaven: Social Christians and the Fight to End American Inequality (under contract with Oxford University Press), which retells the story of the American social gospel. Carter speaks and moderates public conversations about the relationship of Christian faith to a variety of pressing public questions, including everything from racial injustice and economic inequality to runaway political polarization. In recent years these conversations have often focused on the Future of American Democracy.

September 5 | Elaine James and Chef Margo Carner

A Fresh Take on Freshwater Crises: How the Old Testament Sheds New Light

Elaine T. James, associate professor of Old Testament, joined the faculty in 2019. She is the author of An Invitation to Biblical Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Landscapes of the Song of Songs: Poetry and Place (Oxford University Press, 2017). Her work focuses on the literature of the Hebrew Bible, especially its poetry, examining its significance in ancient contexts and its legacies for the contemporary world. Guiding her research are questions about how aesthetic practices shape religious experience and theological thought. She is particularly interested in ancient concepts of ecology, art and creativity, and gender.

October 3 | Aminah Al-Attas Bradford and Chef Salvatore Riccobono

Good Trouble: The intersections of religion, microbiology, ecology and race

Dr. Bradford is an Arab-American scholar of religion and Christian thought currently serving as a postdoctoral research fellow at North Carolina State University. What is she doing in an ecology lab? A unifying inter-religious belief, that humans do not exist without God, is sometimes forgotten—but most religious traditions have scarcely begun to think that humans don’t exist without their microbiome. Christianity is no exception. Given Christian power in the US, this is to the detriment of all. Christian thought is hardly set up to engage humanity’s multi-species, symbiotic reality. What microbes blend together (nature-culture, animal-human, me-you), Christian thinkers typically keep apart.

November 7 | Rebecca Nagel and Chef Joe Rocchi

Contemporary Indigenous Storytelling: Exploring the History Being Made Today

Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning advocate, writer, and citizen of Cherokee Nation. As the host of the chart-topping podcast “This Land”, Nagle told the story of one Supreme Court case about tribal land in Oklahoma, the small-town murder that started it, and the surprising connection to her own family history. Nagle has been covering the Murphy case since May 2018. Her writing about Native representation and tribal sovereignty has been featured in the Washington Post, The Guardian, USA Today, Teen Vogue, the Huffington Post, and more.

Recently Nagle received The American Mosaic Journalism Prize, the largest cash prize for journalism in the United States. In 2016, Nagle was named one of the National Center American Indian Enterprise Development’s Native American 40 Under 40 for her work to support survivors and advocate for policy change to address the crisis of violence against Native women.