Jesus and Addiction to Origins - Toward an Anthropocentric Study of Religion - Willi Braun
10. "Our Religion Compels us to make a Distinction": Prolegomena on Meals and Social Formation
Jesus and Addiction to Origins - Toward an Anthropocentric Study of Religion - Willi Braun
Willi Braun [+]
University of Alberta
Willi Braun is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History and Classics and the Program in Religious Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the former President of the North American Association for the Study of Religion and also the past President of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies. Although a specialist in the writings and social formations of earliest Christianities in the Roman empire, his work also focuses on the methods and theories of the academic study of religion itself. He has published and presented his work widely and served as editor of a variety of books and journals, including his longtime role as editor of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion; most recently, he co-edited Reading J. Z. Smith: Interviews and Essay (Oxford, 2018).
Description
Inspired by the possibilities suggested by Claude Grignon, this chapter suggests that scholars pay attention to commensal groups in antiquity, but asking not what people did at meals (though that too, of course), but what they did with meals and food. This seemingly small but significant shift in scholarly focus will lend detail, specificity, and conceptual robustness to our work and help us to close in on the differences in nuance and focus of early Christian commensal practices.