EATING HEAVEN

Pastorchef!

Though church ministers do all sorts of odd things, it’s not often they get to host cooking demonstrations. You gotta love this job! Just yesterday, as part of the Feast•Pray•Love art exhibition and the wider Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, I got to foist my minimal cooking expertise on some unsuspecting folks at Collins Street’s…

A restaurant shepherd

A few years back I had the pleasure of meeting Esther Lou, a Chinese-American woman who has a ministry to kitchen workers in the Chinese restaurants of Los Angeles. She calls herself a ‘restaurant shepherd’. Industry statistics tell of more than 1 million immigrant labourers working in some 42,000 Chinese restaurants in the US. According…

Poetry at the table #3

Last week I attended Mass at St Francis here in the city. It was not a planned thing. I just happened to be in the neighbourhood. It’s a familiar place. In fact, I used to take my students there each year. In an introduction to spirituality, we visited several churches of various brands, St Francis included. I…

Poetry at the café #1

New year’s resolutions are fine, really. But when a friend told me earlier this year he’s resolved to give up coffee, quite frankly he crossed a line. I like coffee. Coffee is good and I’m sure there’s a sacred text somewhere that says so. To imagine my daily round without it is … well, it’s…

Interview with Eternity

Eternity is a national religious newspaper published monthly by the Bible Society. Not only has my ever-so-slightly-biased friend Kara Martin (faculty member at Ridley College) written a very generous review of Eating Heaven, they’ve now published an extended interview they did with me on the subject of the book.

Supper and justice

‘.. without supper, without love, without table companionship, justice can become a program that we do to other people.’ M. Davis, ‘Dorothy Day: The Only Solution is Love’ in Hospitality 17 (1), 1988.

‘Eating Heaven’ at Readings

Chris Gordon, Events Manager at Readings Bookstore, has offered some affirming words for Eating Heaven. As we move towards our Christmas Day preparations for the ‘Meal to End All Meals’, with expectations heightened by all around you, let’s remember why we do this every single year, even if we are not religious, spiritual or family…

De Botton on the Table

The popular English philosopher Alain de Botton has gotten a mountain of press over his book Religion for Atheists, and not all of it glowing. I’ve commented on it more generally here. But what he says about the table is worth a separate mention. In one of his early chapters, de Botton argues that embracing the stranger…

‘Eating Heaven’ on Radio National

Tonight on Radio National’s The Spirit of Things, the program Food for Body and Soul includes an interview I did with the delightful Rachael Kohn on Eating Heaven. You can download the podcast here.

Ethos review

Just yesterday the Ethos Centre for Christianity and Society included a review of Eating Heaven by Megan Curlis-Gibson in its Engage publication. The review includes reflections on much more than the book. It’s worth a read.

Review in Australian Christian Writers

The author Anne Hamilton has provided a lovely review on the site of Australian Christian Writers, an organisation, I’m afraid to say, I didn’t even know existed. But now I do! Thank you Anne. You can access the review here.

‘Eating Heaven’ launched

It was a great relief last night to see the book Eating Heaven officially launched. Because my writing is atrociously slow, whenever something finally eventuates, my sense of relief is beyond reasonable. Still, it was an affirming night full of supportive friends, generous words and lots of book sold! Readers Feast bookstore was the venue, a wonderful neighbour to Collins…

Poole’s ‘You Aren’t What You Eat’

Not long ago I read Stephen Poole’s biting little book You Aren’t What You Eat: Fed Up with Gastroculture. In the final chapter I scrawled in the margins ‘I am drenched with sarcasm’. Truly, it drips from every page. Still, despite the lasting damp, Poole’s critique should be heard. Poole takes aim at the current cultural obsessions with…

Southern Fare III

With my beloved far away in rural Texas, I’ve been re-reading Michael Lee West’s Consuming Passions, a delightfully written memoir of food and family in the South. It makes me wish even more I was there with her. West’s personal observations about gender in the kitchens of her Tennessee childhood illustrate how much has changed in…

Southern Fare II

Another installment from Michael Lee West’s southern memoir Consuming Passions on family, identity and recipes …. Even when I’m all by myself, I never cook alone. My grandparents are dead, along with my father and some favorite aunts … but my family lives on in their recipes. I bring Mimi’s chocolate cake to potlucks and Aunt Tempe’s…

Southern Fare I

My beloved is in Texas; returned to the place of family, sweet tea and barbecue. In honour of her travels (without me!) I’ve been re-reading Michael Lee West’s Consuming Passions: A Food Obsessed Life. It’s a wonderful book, an easy-to-read memoir of family and food in the South. For the most part, the stories centre around the…

Gopnik’s ‘The Table Comes First’

The table comes first, before the meal and even before the kitchen where it’s made. It precedes everything in remaining the one plausible hearth of family life, the raft to ride down the river of our exitence, even in the hardest times. The table also comes first in the sense that its drama — the…

Poetry at the table #2

At Collins Street the first Sunday of the month is communion Sunday, the day we break bread together and swallow shots of unfermented grape juice from the tiniest glasses. The older I get, the more this odd and simple ritual means to me. There is something about the feel of the bread in my hands, the sacred…

Kitchen Table Memoirs

I’m not long back from a few days in Christchurch, New Zealand, with the wonderful communities that make up the church formally known as Spreydon, now Southwest. More of that later. On the way home I passed the transit hours (always too many) reading Nick Richardson’s Kitchen Table Memoirs: Shared Stories from Australian Writers. It’s a…

More on communion

After yesterday’s post, and just to confirm for my good Anglican friend Geoff my definite ‘anglo-catholic’ tendencies … …the breaking of bread at holy communion can break you right open. It’s like the gates to your heart have opened and everything you have ever loved comes tumbling out to be missed and praised and mourned and…