Food And Faith In Christian Culture

This anthology follows the intersection of food and faith from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century, charting the complex relationship among religious eating habits and politics, culture, and social structure.

A comprehensive theological framework for assessing the significance of eating, demonstrating that eating is of profound economic, moral and theological significance.

An indispensable resource for exploring food and faith, this two-volume set offers information on food-related religious beliefs, customs, and practices from around the world. Why do Catholics eat fish on Fridays? Why are there retirement homes for aged cows in India? What culture holds ceremonies to welcome the first salmon? More than five billion people worldwide claim a religious identity that shapes the way they think about themselves, how they act, and what they eat. Food, Feasts, and Faith: An Encyclopedia of Food Culture in World Religions explores how the food we eat every day often serves purposes other than to keep us healthy and stay alive: we eat to express our faith and to adhere to ethnic or cultural traditions that are part of who we are. This book provides readers with an understanding of the rich world of food and faith. It contains more than 200 alphabetically arranged entries that describe the beliefs and customs of well-established major world religions and sects as well as those of smaller faith communities and new religious movements. The entries cover topics such as religious food rules, religious festivals and symbolic foods, and vegetarianism and veganism, as well as general themes such as rites of passage, social justice, hospitality, and compassion. Each entry on religion explains what the religious dietary laws and guidelines are and how these were interpreted and put into practice historically and in modern settings. The coverage also includes important festivals and feast days as well as significant religious figures and organizations. Additionally, some 160 sidebars provide examples and more detailed information as well as fun facts.

From the creator of the bestseller Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective comes Food & Faith. Food is itself a joyful gift – recall how the gift of food so often mediates the sanctity and preciousness of life. This collection of reflections by Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Johnson, Alan Durning and others helps you start thinking about the moral, spiritual and economic implications of eating. Readings focus on the enjoyment and spirituality of good food, ways in which eating connects us to the land and to each other, and on the economic, environmental and cultural impacts of daily food choices. Food & Faith includes an eight-week study guide for groups or individuals, which leads to action: setting a table that is healthy, joyful and just.

Recounts the author's experiences founding a faith-based community garden in rural North Carolina, and emphasizes how growing one's own food can help readers reconnect with the land and divine faith.

Food for Life draws on L. Shannon Jung's gifts as theologian, ethicist, pastor, and eater extraordinaire. In this deeply thoughtful but very lively book, he encourages us to see our humdrum habits of eating and drinking as a spiritual practice that can renew and transform us and our world. In a fascinating sequence that takes us from the personal to the global, Jung establishes the religious meaning of eating and shows how it dictates a healthy order of eating. He exposes Christians' complicity in the face of widespread eating disorders we experience personally, culturally, and globally, and he argues that these disorders can be reversed through faith, Christian practices, attention to habitual activities like cooking and gardening, the church's ministry, and transforming our cultural policies about food.

The links between religion and food have been known for centuries, and yet we rarely examine or understand the nature of the relationship between food and spirituality, or food and sin. Drawing on literature, politics, and philosophy as well as theology, this book unlocks the role food has played within religious tradition. A fascinating book tracing the centuries-old links between theology and food, showing religion in a new and intriguing light Draws on examples from different religions: the significance of the apple in the Christian Bible and the eating of bread as the body of Christ; the eating and fasting around Ramadan for Muslims; and how the dietary laws of Judaism are designed to create an awareness of living in the time and space of the Torah Explores ideas from the fields of literature, politics, and philosophy, as well as theology Takes seriously the idea that food matters, and that the many aspects of eating – table fellowship, culinary traditions, the aesthetic, ethical and political dimensions of food – are important and complex, and throw light on both religion and our relationship to food

This book, the first of its kind, critically analyzes the conjunctions of 21st century food, faith and society. It aims to provide a fresh approach that theorizes the culinary sphere in its association with morality, identity, justice and the sublime. In a changing climate of food fads, diet plans, gastropolitics and fusion tastes, this edited volume interrogates, analyzes and critiques various situations in which food, the state, civil society, gender, race, and faith intersect and even transmute. Informed by emergent post-secularist views of religion(s) and novel approaches to twenty-first century forms of mobility and fixity, the book's primary aim is to ponder through ethnography the manifold meanings of food, eating and commensality as dynamic social and religious practices. The main goal of Eating Religiously: Food and Faith in the 21st Century is to present cutting-edge anthropological research that examines the causes, effects, meanings and repercussions of theoretical and real-world relationships between culinary practices and religion, identity politics and national pride. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Food, Culture, and Society.