Antiquitopia

About a month ago, some fellow religion colleagues and I were having dinner and started bantering.  During the banter, I suggested a course on religion and food.  At the time, I was half-joking, but I have been occasionally thinking about it over the past month and increasingly think it would be an interesting course.  Anthropologists have long discussed food and culture, and so there is already a lot of theoretical material out there.  And different religious traditions have food laws, customs, etc.  There are the discussions of food and sacrifice, often looking at sacrifice as a meal or the ritualization of a meal at least.  There is, in Christianity, of course, the ritualized meal of the Eucharist. So I have been trying to think of different types of course that could approach religion through food.  There could be a comparative course that discusses different religious traditions through food, meals, cuisine.  There could be a course in my o...

I have been working through the different references to Moses in the New Testament for an upcoming project.  While there are some well-worn topics discussed by scholars (Jesus as a prophet like Moses; which, from the other perspective, makes Moses a Proto-Christ; Moses as faithful servant; etc.), I was struck by a detail--one of the smallest of details--that shows up in the Acts of the Apostles in Stephen's speech and again in the Epistle to the Hebrews.  Acts 7 and Hebrews are often discussed together, particularly for their rather similar views of the temple and the notation of Moses making the tabernacle "according to the pattern" shown to him--used in both texts to suggest a temple not made with hands and that God does not dwell in hand-made temples. But there is another detail that I had not previously considered about Moses they share:  his beauty.  When Stephen begins his discussion of Moses (which takes up about half of his speech), he states: At this tim...