“But gratitude is not pride, and this is a nation of sinners, prone to do what sinners in this position have always done—which is to interpret blessings as rewards, to see the milk and honey as ‘best in show’ indicators. The reason this is a big deal is that the very quickest way to shut …
Which Works Out for Them
“They want you to make all your points to the satisfaction of those who have a vested interest in not being satisfied by them” (Food Catholic, p. 36).
As Would Seem to Follow
“And if we should not work for food that perishes, we shouldn’t get worked up over food that perishes” (Food Catholic, p. 30).
Flags, Fireworks, and Fun
“In my experience, those who are most ambivalent or cynical about patriotic pieties—flags, fireworks, and fun—are most likely to support the abuses of statist power when the state is attempting to become some jitney god in the lives of the citizens. But those who wave the flag at the parade and eat their hot dogs …
Prophetic Proportions
[No sense of proportion] “is why so much of the contemporary ‘prophetic’ witness to our civil rulers is such a joke. It is not so much dressed in camel hair with a leather belt as it is decked out in some Kuba the Clown outfit. And then it blames the lack of responsiveness on hardness …
A Big Sheet
“Christians who feel guilt over their decisions of what to eat need to go to sleep on the roof, like Peter did, so that they might see the entire inventory of General Mills lowered in a sheet from heaven” (Food Catholic, pp. 29-30).
False Moral Equivalence
“If He does not lose a sense of proportion in the Day of Judgment, then His representatives must no ‘get to preaching’ in such a way as to get carried away. And they must not get to denouncing sins in such a way as to create a moral equivalence between excessive consumerism on display at …
Dietary Sanctification
“There is a kind of mind that flips this around, and wants the heart to be established by food—wants to be in with God by means of what is put into the mouth” (Food Catholic, p. 27).
The Confusion Begins Early
“But this moral inversion is not something that can be achieved in a day. Before you reverse good and evil, you must flatten good and evil, and before you flatten good and evil, you must flatten greater evil and lesser evil and greater good and lesser good. Moral egalitarianism is a rot that proceeds slowly. …
Posing as Peasants
“One of the saddest features (or funniest, depending) of contemporary food snobbery is the notion that rich people are getting in touch with the rhythms of the earth when they shop at the Whole Foods market. Paying three times as much for a really good apple is a fine thing to do, so long as …