“One might have hoped that, with so gracious a creature as wine, even the most ardent religionists and secularists would have made an exception to their universal custom of missing the point of things . . . Consider first the teetotalers . . . Something underhanded has to be done to grape juice to keep …
Not to Mention the Pantry
“Deliver us, O Lord, from religiosity and Godlessness alike, lest we wander in fakery or die of boredom. Restore to us Thyself as Giver and the secular as Thy gift. Let idols perish and con jobs cease. Give repentance and better minds to all pagans and secularists; in the meantime, of Thy mercy, keep them …
So Don’t Be a Food Fusser
“The feet-on-the-stove stance of this book is a deliberate attempt to cure myself, and anyone else who will listen, of the nasty habit of worrying the world to pieces like a terrier with a rag . . . If some true believer in the gospel of haste comes along and asks us why we are …
Stuffed Manskins
“There is no way around the killing here that is not less than human in the end; man is what he is: hunter, butcher, carnivore; save him without that and you save nothing — manskins stuffed with sacred sawdust reach no New Jerusalem” (Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, p. 49).
What We Shall Need Forever
“To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need …
Fatherhood Gruel
I said in an early post on this theme that eating disorders and food-fad disorders were a function of father hunger. Time to unpack that a bit. This is just a beginning, because it is a huge subject. One of the great problems we have in conservative Christian circles is that of accepting slanders about …
Our Daily Taste
“O Lord, refresh our sensibilities. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in, and sauces which are never the same twice” (Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, p. 27).
Losing Both God and the Thing Idolized
“Idolatry has two faults. It is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things . . . The heaviest weight on the shoulders of the earth is still the age-old idolatry by whcih man has cheated himself of both Creator and creation” (Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper …
So Just Transfer All That to the Kitchen
“Or how much curious and loving attention was expended by the first man who looked hard enough at the insides of trees, the entrails of cats, the hind ends of horses and the juice of pine tree to realize he could turn them all into the first fiddle. No doubt his wife urged him to …
The Placiness of Places
“The uniqueness, the placiness, of places derives not from abstractions like location, but from confrontations like man-onion” (Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, p. 11).