$4,200. As best as I can calculate it, that’s the amount of money I’ve spent over the last 10 years on potato chips, lollipops, bagels, pretzels, and donuts for my writing students. If I walk into class on a peer review day and don’t have a bag of hard candy to share, I feel like I’m not doing my job. Many of you know that feeling—the need to “break bread” with students, the desire to have them feel at ease, to bond. But why do we need it do it? After all, on a poor teacher’s budget, it can become a very expensive habit. For me, the answer is community. I’ve discovered the best way to get the challenging work of writing done is when students feel as if they are part of a productive writing community in a safe atmosphere that values critical feedback and intellectual risk-taking. For some inexplicable reason, food seems to be the shortest route to that communal state of mind. Of course, the topic of community in rhetoric and composition isn’t a new one by any means. Over a decade ago, scholars in this discipline were consumed with the idea of community and its impact on writing pedagogy. As social constructionists began to take expressivists and cognitivists to task, ideas regarding the function and form of community in writing classrooms abounded in many academic journals. Conference presentations and writing textbooks offered teachers and students innumerable community-building techniques, from sharing food to collaborative learning. All the while, experts (many of whom were polarized on the topic) argued over the definition, usefulness, and universality of the term. Clearly, in the late 1980s, talk of community within the discipline had become so ubiquitous that it attained the status of lore. Unfortunately, like many once contentious issues, the scholarly debate over the definition of community has passed into obscurity. Those participating in the conversation reached a theoretical stalemate, and the discussion more or less petered out. Thus, while academic debate highlighted the potential benefits of community building, leading to the centrality of community in writing classrooms, it left unresolved crucial issues about that community. As a teacher who has spent some time investigating the spiritual dimensions of teaching and learning, I believe that spirituality plays a role in further deepening our theoretical understanding of community. Frankly, when I revisit the earliest scholarly discussions about community in rhetoric and composition, I find them lacking: the arguments being offered at the time often suffer from binary thinking, and that extreme polarization prematurely closed off an exciting, multi-faceted