Soul Food:

My recent travel to the Deep South to visit family overlapped with a couple of events here in Southern California I wanted to attend. Had I been in town, though, I’d have been forced to choose between the two.

One was a conversation on “Orthodoxy, the Environment and Ecumenism,” a discussion among the Rev. John Chryssavgis, who is deacon of the Ecumenical Office of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and advisor to His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople; Eric D. Perl, a Loyola Marymount University associate professor of philosophy; and Douglas E. Burton-Christie, a professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University, which hosted the Huffington Ecumenical Institute event at its Los Angeles campus on Feb. 21.

For decades now Bartholomew I and Chryssavgis as well as other clergy, scholars and theologians have been making the connection between ecology, Orthodoxy and ecumenism.

A book by the often-called “Green Patriarch,” which ties the three elements together, is due to be released by Random House mid-year. I hope to review the volume in this column before then.

The other event also took place Feb. 21, right here in Surf City in the gymnasium of Huntington Beach High School. It was a sort of grand finale to the city’s 2007-08 “Huntington Beach Reads One Book.”

I hope, though, that it will instead prove to be a beginning, a seed planted that will grow with the doggedness of a kudzu vine in the Deep South.

Two weeks ago, Greg Mortenson — author and subject of “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time” — spoke to a crowd, some of whom arrived from cities as distant as Hollywood, San Diego and Palm Springs.

Among them was Consul General Syed Ibne Abbas from the Consulate of Pakistan in Los Angeles.

According to Mary Adams Urashima and Richard K. Moore of the Huntington Beach Human Relations Task Force, which chose “Three Cups of Tea” as the first book for the fledgling “Huntington Beach Reads One Book” program, nearly 2,000 people turned out on a chilly, rainy night to hear Mortenson speak.

Many stood in line for two hours or more to get the best seats.

Mortenson’s tale is the result, in part, of what has proved to be, quite literally, a happy accident.

A mountain climber, Mortenson set out some years ago to conquer K2, the second–tallest mountain in the world.