Antiquitopia

I just saw that a friend of mine, David Freidenreich at Colby College, received the American Academy of Religion Book Award for Textual Studies.  Award for Excellence in Religion: Textual Studies David M. Freidenreich, Colby College Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law . University of California Press, 2011. Check out the book here .  It looks like it is available in hardback and kindle.  Congrats David!

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...