This summer and fall I did a series of posts on incarnation and eating (my two great passions in life), and the [pompously pseudonymous but] excellent and genial thinking fellows over at The Hipster Conservative decided to run the series as a long essay. If you’re new around here, please go read! This is one of my…
Marianne is one of the most interesting people I have ever met, and I’m excited to have her do a guest post! She graduated from my alma mater some years before I came through, and is still a legend in the English department, especially because of her play interpretation of Till We Have Faces (which I…
“Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels.” – Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating” One afternoon during college, a professor was lecturing on the idea that college is a…
Have you heard of a “commonplace book”? It’s an old idea, and has been most recently resurrected by hipsters bearing Moleskines. Basically, it’s a notebook full of accumulated everyday notes – your shopping list, a quote from the book you’re reading, the recipe copied from your mom’s cookbook, a sketch from the metro of the…
Previous posts in this series: Loving Your Food, Eating in Community, and Jesus Ate. For the benefit of my readers: I write this for Christians, with the understanding that communion is a sacrament and an essential, regular part of a healthy practice of faith and a healthy church. For my own part, I am of the…
In my first food post, I mentioned that I believe it is anti-Christian to have a merely utilitarian relationship to one’s food. Maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but I think it’s worth considering. I think that prior the fall, food was good and our relationship to it was utilitarian in the manner of good things…
This week has been for me a meditation on the Eucharist, thanks to some beautiful writings on it. Here are the highlights: From “Small, Good Things” by Casey N. Cep at The Paris Review: One way of understanding the sacraments, perhaps best articulated by liturgist Gordon Lathrop, is that simple things become central things. When Christians…
I’m starting off with the big picture here, so bear with me! As a culture, we like to forget our dependencies, yet we still observe small reverences to the sacred act of eating food with another person: a first date usually means dinner, death or a birth signals the community to bring meals to the…
This was our dinner last night (sorry, no picture!), and I thought I’d share the recipe. This comes from my mom’s good friend Joanne, and once she made it for our Bible study group and afterward everyone was begging her for the recipe. I suspect that it’s now a regular meal for most of those…