On Table Manners and Worship, 1

Warning: the moralizations and gross speculations of a shade tree theologian follow (unfortunately we don’t get much sun in the UK, and thus we don’t get a whole lot tree shade either… what this means for what follows I’ll leave for the reader to figure out)

I want to suggest that table manners, can become genuine instances of and opportunities for Christian worship.

One argument that I’ve dreamed up roughly runs this way

1. Table manners are ascriptions to the worthiness of mankind (another way of saying this is that they are expressions of human dignity)

2. To ascribe worth to something is to say, in whatever measure, that it is beautiful or good or both.

3. Christians believe that beauty and goodness are qualities rooted in the character of God. They are not free-floating concepts with an existence all their own nor are they merely linguistic tags identifying human feelings about things. It is possible to speak of a thing’s beauty and be more or less right or wrong in saying so. ya ya… a controversial statement but read C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man.

4. Christians believe that God’s goodness and beauty are expressed in his creation. Beauty and goodness in creation are derivative of God’s beauty and goodness.

5. To express the worth of something (its beauty and/or goodness) in creation is to express appreciation of God’s worth – even if indirectly, or unintentionally – who has made it so.

6. Worship is essentially proclaiming the worth or worthiness of something. The word ‘worship’ is a shortened form of the word ‘worthship.’

THUS!> The practicing of table manners can be a means to worship God. HA!

I’ll try and unpack this a little more in my next installment.

Ruminations on a Moral Imagination

Bourgeois Baby started a rant that I couldn't help participating in a bit. I'm still working towards the notion of a 'moral imagination' that is not equivalent to a legalistic imagination. Perhaps I should adjust my terminology?

Food for Thought: Some Thoughts about Food

On Monday, I overheard on BBC Radio 4's Food Programme a few startling words in relationship to small-holding farming in West Virginia: "more noble," "elegant," and "creation stewardship". (If you want a listen, there's a cordial debate between the farmer, Joel Salatin, and his ideological opposite, Dennis Avery, former agricultural analyst for the US State Department and small-holder himself.) So much of self-proclaimed evangelical Salatin's vocabulary regarding his farming enterprise seemed flavored by Aristotelian ethics, that we couldn't help but check him out further. "No Bar Code" is an article by Michael Pollan (very much in sympathy with Salatin), while "Dining Dilemmas" is a review of Pollan's book on Books and Culture. We're interested in trying to collect more informed points of view from the different sides as well, but we both are really struck by the notion of paying attention to a chicken's "chicken-ness" and crafting an ecosystem as well as an economic system that pays attention to the nature not only of animals and plants, but their human consumers. All very glowingly idealistic -- can it still feed the world? Avery doesn't think so (and for credible reasons), but Salatin is optimistic. Is there any way to balance these two together?

On a related front, here's a healthy reminder by my new favorite journalist Agnieszka Tennant not to get blindingly self-righteous about the relationship between our purchasing and our virtue!

The theme here - thinking about the relationships between what we eat, where it came from, how we purchase it and prepare it, and cultivating virtue and creative stewardship of the earth.

Appetizer

From Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature:

"...nature rightly understood might turn out to be a suggestive teacher. Nature might yield a pointing-toward, a hinting-at, a promising-forth of a wholesome direction, a propitious attitude, a dignified and fulfilling posture for our lives. Nature, and even natural necessity, might yet point the way to virtue."