Anyone who has known me for more than a half hour realizes what a gourmand I am, a bon vivant perhaps disproportionately enamored with good food and homemade wine (the latter perfected by the Italians I hunt with at Menantico Gun Club), who watches only cooking shows, documentaries, and sports, largely in that order. I was then delighted to be invited to the bi-annual McGinley lecture in my adopted hometown of Manhattan, and even more so to discover the topic was food, fellowship and religious identity.
The current lecture series is the brainchild of Jesuit scholar Patrick Ryan, a Harvard-trained priest, Islamicist, missionary to West Africa for decades, and close personal mentor and friend. He has established New York City’s leading “trialogue” project which brings Jews, Christians and Muslims together to explore “religion and society” as the title of his endowed chair at Fordham (formerly held by Cardinal Avery Dulles) iterates.
This season’s talk centered on the monotheistic traditions’ views of “Law and Love,” framed in the context of dietary prohibitions in each of the sibling religions. His partners in conversation were Amir Hussain, an Islamic professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University in California, and Claudia Setzer, a Jewish Scripture scholar from Manhattan College. With distinctly American tributes to gastronomical excess (Thanksgiving and, soon after, the Super Bowl) fast approaching, it was apropos to reflect on how and whether it matters what, when, and with whom we choose to break bread as religious women and men in the 21st century. The scholars involved all agreed that it did, and thanks to them I now understand the difference between a kosher deli on 2nd Ave and a halal food truck outside of Grand Central much more clearly than ever before.
Their claim was that dietary laws were not ancient superstitious protections against trichinosis in a world without refrigeration, but rather pronounced claims of religious identity which consecrated a specific way of life over and against the secular world of non-practitioners. In such a system, believers “loved the laws” of the Lord, which were, as the Psalmist puts it, “sweeter to us than honey” (Ps 119). They sought in some sense to worship and keep ever in mind the God to whom they pledged allegiance, with their whole being and entire selves, altering the most primordial processes of life (sustenance and physical consumption) to align those integrated and whole selves with an experience of the Numinous and Almighty.
In such efforts, religious practice then moves away from “what one does” to become much more closely connected to “who one is.” The collective practices also serve to knit the community tightly together in a context of unbelieving surrounding environs.
After tracing the food prohibitions in the three traditions, and discussing the interpenetrating relationship between law, faith, adherence to religious texts, and love of the divine and of others in each of them, Father Ryan commented that he “was happy to see that during the recent Assisi 2011 meeting of religious leaders of every variety with Pope Benedict, even if there was no common prayer, a ‘frugal lunch’ was provided, with the ‘menu varied to meet the dietary requirements of all the religions represented.’ Law and love, [canon] lawyers and lovers, can sit down at table together if the buffet is sufficiently varied.”
The scholars, administrators and friends of the McGinley chair practiced what they preached, as an intimate group of us enjoyed a fabulous meal (in which all the food was both kashrut and halal) at Bello’s Italian restaurant in the Upper West Side after the event. Interreligious dialogue is not only a crucial theoretical necessity in an increasingly globalized and shrinking world, but an enjoyable and heartening practical reality when engaged in with fascinating men and women of goodwill, with such varied cultural and personal backgrounds.
Michael M. Canaris is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty at Sacred Heart University.
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