For All Who Hunger: Searching for Communion in a Shattered World

Scott, a Lutheran pastor and founder of the Brooklyn-based congregation St. Lydia’s Dinner Church, explores the power of communal worship meals in this memoir. At St. Lydia’s, she began a “dinner church” without funding or a congregation. During those first eight years, the struggles and lessons the parishioners learn transformed the author herself. In her words, “this is a story about how bread, broken and passed from hand to hand, rescued me from my aloneness.” Throughout, Scott explores vignettes of real life shared over meals that bring hope, healing, and most of all, connectedness in a fractured world, as St. Lydia’s itself becomes a place fighting first for survival and then for social justice. Scott finishes the book recounting her departure from St. Lydia’s Brooklyn “to travel an unknown path” that includes the memories and friendships formed over broken bread.