Food and Funerals: Why Meals Matter for Christian Mortality and How We Might Respond Gustatorily to Changing Death Practices

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Notes

John 12:23–24, NRSV, as with all scripture quotations.

John 1:29.

Exod. 12:22; John 19:29.

1 Cor. 11:26.

1 Cor. 11:29–30.

Romans 4.1.

The Martyrdom of Polycarp, 15.2.

For a helpful account of the cultural continuities and theological distinctions of early Christian funeral eating, see Robin M. Jensen’s “Dining with the Dead: From the Mensa to the Altar in Christian Late Antiquity,” in Commemorating the Dead Texts and Artifacts in Context: Studies of Roman, Jewish, and Christian Burials, ed. Laurie Brink and Deborah A. Green (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 107–43.

Decimus Magnus Ausonius, Epitaphia, 31, in Ausonius, Vol. I: Books 1-17. Translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Loeb Classical Library. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919, 158–159.

Jensen, 116.

Paulinus of Nola, Carminum, 27.542.

Augustine, Confessions, 6.2.

Jensen, 135.

Paulinus, Epistle 13 (to Pammachius), 11–14, cited in Jensen, 133.

Luke 14:12b–14.

Gordon Lathrop, The Four Gospels on Sunday: The New Testament and the Reform of Christian Worship (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012).

Ibid., 49.

Ibid., 48.

Ibid., 171.

On this practice, see Jacqueline S. Thursby, Funeral Festivals in America: Rituals for the Living (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006).

Thursby, Kindle loc. 1155–56.

Robert Pogue Harrison finds the dislocation from local food to be part of a Western denial of death: “Uncertainty about the provenance of one’s food and the destination of one’s corpse relate to each other not accidentally but essentially. Both stem from a single-minded effort undertaken by the West in the last few centuries to emancipate ourselves, by whatever means necessary, from our millennial bondage to the land and our servitude to the dead.” Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 32.

“Today, in the interest of the survival of all, we need a new relationship to the earth. Among the most important forms that relationship takes is to accept the finitude of life and to consent to its natural rhythm.” Dorothee Söelle, The Mystery of Death (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), Kindle loc. 500–01.

For an introduction to the natural burial movement and its theological implications, see Benjamin M. Stewart, “Committed to the Earth: Ecotheological Dimensions of Christian Burial Practices,” Liturgy 27, no. 2 (2012): 62–72.

See Mirjam Klaassens, “Final Places: Geographies of Death and Remembrance in the Netherlands,” PhD diss., University of Groningen, 2011; and Douglas Davies and Hannah Rumble, Natural Burial: Traditional-Secular Spiritualities and Funeral Innovation (New York: Continuum, 2012).

Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2003), 229.

Aldo Leopold, The Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 253; cited in Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Kindle loc. 907–08.

Söelle, The Mystery of Death, Kindle loc. 1171–75.

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Notes on contributors

Benjamin M. Stewart

Benjamin M. Stewart is the Gordon A. Braatz associate professor of worship and director of advanced studies at the Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago.