This issue of The Other Journal examines the complex relationships between ourselves, our culture, and our food from a theological perspective. The thoughtful contributors to this issue take us to Middle Earth and the Romanian city of Constanta. They swing by swank Manhattan bistros and raucous NFL stadiums on game day. But most importantly, they return us to the Communion table and to that first garden where God walked with us and gave us the gift of his creation.
In this interview, James Alison speaks with us about his work on the issue of sexuality and how he attempts to create a dialogical space around this topic in his Catholic context.
Amy Scheer writes about love and legalism in a Michigan homeless shelter.
In this essay, Villegas suggests that through worship we are invited to let the Holy Spirit form us into an assemblage of priests, subverting hierarchies of power and always making space for new people to express the good news in our lives.
Breaking up is hard to do. John Totten addresses music as a method for regulating distressing emotions in the context of broken attachments, specifically regarding his own “relationship” with the music of classic rock genre benders Steely Dan.
Jo-Ann Badley and Stephanie Neill propose that the current interest in food in North American culture redresses cultural patterns of detachment in ways consonant with New Testament practices of communion, calling us to gratitude and recognition of the relational character of human living.
After an earnest fifteen-year abstention from meat, Alissa Herbaly Coons finds solace in the stockpot, coming to terms with her place in the food chain and the glory to be found in the breaking not only of bread, but of bones as well.
Elizabeth Antus argues that an engagement with the work of best-selling author Geneen Roth enables Christians, especially women, to articulate resistance to the body-hating cycle of dieting and bingeing so prominent in US culture.
In “The Catch,” Long offers the image of a fisherwoman, carrying the “stunned pewter” of her catch, to market. In “Esau’s Portion,” we are brought to the hospital cafeteria and the funeral potluck, where Long hungers for the memory of one lost: “what I lack is the thanks you made me take in, bowed down, at the end of any given day.”
The stories we tell about ourselves and our faith are important, says Chelle Stearns, and in this essay she looks at how our athletic culture informs those stories. Taking her cue from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Stearns searches for a middle ground in our faith and Christology between the heroism of warriors and the heroism of healers.
