Adirondack Community College Christianity and Food Research Paper Description – You are required to write one research paper. Your essays should be about 1

Adirondack Community College Christianity and Food Research Paper Description – You are required to write one research paper. Your essays should be about 15 pages and contain eight sources, but otherwise you may follow the same description above for structuring short essays. You may simply write based on one of the questions given above, (I have chosen Christianity and Food)

Christianity and Food – An increasingly discussed moral issue in Christianity in light of theology, environmental ethics, and animal well-being is the issue of eating well. In light of Christian issues such as a theology of creation, environmental ethics, and animal well-being (you do not need to examine all three necessarily, but you certainly might), what would an ethical diet look like that has its roots in the Christian tradition? Note: If you like, feel free to write on a different religious tradition—whether one you practice and are more familiar with or one you simply would like to investigate further.

Research – You are required to have five sources in each paper. You must use some combination of books and peer reviewed journal articles (easily found in the ATLA database) (I have attached some journal articles from this web must use some of it ). No popular or internet sources (besides the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) may be used!

Note:

Specific Instructions for research paper attached.

Easy level of writing and English

write from perspective of ” Muslim international student not christian ” Short Essays OR Research Paper – 40% You may choose from two options for the final
assignment(s). (Short Essays x 2, 20% each; Research Paper 40%)
Due: Short Essays
•
•
Friday October 18, 11:59pm: Essay 1: Laudato si and the Technocratic Paradigm
Friday November 15, 11:59pm: Essay 2: Christianity and Food
Description – You are required to write two essays based on your choice of three topics/questions
listed below. Your essays should be between 15 pages and follow a general structure of
EXPLAINATION, ANALYSIS, CONSTRUCTION. That is, in addition to an introduction and a
conclusion, you should devote a section of the paper 1) to explaining the issue/question, why it is
important, and any information you find relevant to helping your reader understand the problem
and what is at stake in its exploration. This is a descriptive section, where you are simply helping the
reader understand the topic under consideration by defining terms and clarifying the nature of the
issue/problem you are exploring; 2) to an analysis of the problem that explores the issues involved
that help you make sense of the issue and provides reasons for why someone might solve the
problem in a certain way. In this section you might explore various solutions to the problem at hand
and explain how each make sense of and provide a solution to the question explored, analyzing the
evidence that helps you explore the issue or question at hand; 3) to constructing your preferred
solution or position on the question posed. While you might express authentic doubt, you should
come to a position on the topic and argue why your perspective is ideal.
Evaluation – You will be evaluated based on: the presence of a clear thesis statement, grammar,
style, clarity, your ability to summarize and evaluate the ideas and possibly arguments of others
(including your use of appropriate textual evidence), and the depth of your constructive analysis. I
have provided a rubric below.
Research – You are required to have five sources in each paper. You must use some combination of
books and peer reviewed journal articles (easily found in the ATLA database:
http://www.kings.edu/academics/library/Articles_and_Databases/A_Z_DB ). No popular or
internet sources (besides the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) may be used! (I have
attached some journal articles from this web ) The internet has virtually nothing to offer you and
Google searches for information will lead to nowhere. You may count one reading from the course
toward the five and if you do use the SEP that may count as one as well. Format references in
footnotes, no bibliography, according to Chicago/Turabian citation style for notes
(https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/turabian/turabian-notes-and-bibliography-citation-quickguide.html).
Essay Topics/Questions – Note: you may modify the issues questions to fit your interests and
concerns if you like; there is no need to approach the issues exactly as I have formulated them – use
them as guides to inspire your thinking on the topic in general.
Essay 1: Laudato si and the Technocratic Paradigm – Laudato si goes into much depth describing and
critiquing the technocratic paradigm. In your essay, describe what precisely the technocratic
paradigm is as a concept, and analyze a specific manifestation of the paradigm and how it effects
society negatively—anything you like and are interested in. Finally, construct a solution to this
problem in a way that promotes environmental ethics. E.g., cars running on fossil fuels could easily
be replaced with electric cars, but this does not happen because of fears of corporations losing
profits. The fossil fuel industry and the prevalence of automobiles using fossil fuels is an ecological
hazard.
Essay 2: Christianity and Food – An increasingly discussed moral issue in Christianity in light of
theology, environmental ethics, and animal well-being is the issue of eating well. In light of Christian
issues such as a theology of creation, environmental ethics, and animal well-being (you do not need
to examine all three necessarily, but you certainly might), what would an ethical diet look like that
has its roots in the Christian tradition? Note: If you like, feel free to write on a different religious
tradition—whether one you practice and are more familiar with or one you simply would like to
investigate further,
Essay Grading Rubric
Essay 1/2:
Name
Grammar, Style, Clarity
Explanation and Analysis
2 Points
8 Points
Introduction and Thesis
Statement
2 Points
Comments
Comments
x/2
x/2
Comments
x/8
Grade: x/20, percentage, letter grade. Comments:
Construction
8 Points
Comments
x/8
Due: Research Paper
Description – You are required to write one research paper. Your essays should be about 15 pages
and contain eight sources, but otherwise you may follow the same description above for
structuring short essays. You may simply write based on one of the questions given above, (I have
chosen Christianity and Food)
Research Paper:
Name
Grammar, Style, Clarity
Explanation and Analysis
2 Points
8 Points
Introduction and Thesis
Statement
2 Points
Comments
Comments
x/5
x/5
Comments
x/15
Grade: x/40, percentage, letter grade. Comments:
Construction
8 Points
Comments
x/15
Pastoral Psychol (2015) 64:297–310
DOI 10.1007/s11089-014-0605-5
Hoagies and Tacos: Food and Men’s
Unquenchable Hunger
Ruben Arjona-Mejia
Published online: 13 May 2014
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract This paper explores the relationship between men and food. Building on James E.
Dittes’s work, it suggests that men’s desire for food is indicative not only of their hunger, but
also of an unquenchable sense of hope and a longing for significant relationships. Based on the
insights of several biblical scholars and pastoral theologians, this paper also suggests that a
greater understanding of how and why men eat can contribute to a more pertinent pastoral
ministry with men.
Keywords Men . Food . Hunger . Desire . Hope . Pastoral care . James E. Dittes
Introduction
This paper is about men and food.1 A man’s relationship with food is tolerated, often
celebrated, if he works with food, as a chef. But within the domestic arena, food doesn’t seem
as manly as sports, sex, or cars. In contemporary Mexican cultures, grocery shopping and meal
preparation are generally understood as women’s tasks. My sense is that this is also true for
many other cultures across the globe. Of course, if it is about grilling hamburgers or steaks,
men are called in, perhaps because cultural scripts say that they are responsible for dealing
with the dangers of fire. Following pastoral theologian James E. Dittes, I would say that this
paper is “for those men for whom the shell of manliness is cracking or never did fit
comfortably, for those men who are discovering that manhood is far richer than the charade
of manliness” (1985, p. x). Undoubtedly, men should continue grilling hamburgers, but they
can also enjoy a greater sense of wholeness by exploring the cracks in their shell of manliness.
As I began thinking about men and food, I recalled a group of students at the Presbyterian
Seminary in Mexico City who around midnight would sometimes jump over the front gate of
the seminary to find something to eat. In that boarding school, dinner was served at 7 p.m. and
1
The relationship between men and food has not been sufficiently explored in pastoral theology. Within the wider
field of religious studies, however, there seems to be an increasing interest in food studies. The American
Academy of Religion, for example, has recently included several program units on food: a seminar entitled
Religion, Food, and Eating in North America (2008–2012), a Religion and Food Group (2014), and a group that
explores the intersection between religion, food, and migration (2014).
R. Arjona-Mejia (*)
Princeton Theological Seminary, P. O. Box 821, Princeton, NJ 08542-0803, USA
e-mail: rubenarjona@gmail.com
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Pastoral Psychol (2015) 64:297–310
the gate was locked at 10. Needless to say, by 11 p.m. these young men were starving. Happily
for these students, Mexico City is the kind of place where one can always find something to
eat. Twenty years later, now living in Princeton, New Jersey, I have also seen young men
looking for food late at night. Both in large cities and small towns, men look for food. But it
isn’t all about food. In this paper, I hope to expand upon the work of James Dittes by
suggesting that men look for food not only because they are hungry, but because also their
unquenchable hunger is a symbol of their unquenchable hope and their desire to develop
significant friendships.
Desiring God; desiring caregivers
In his book Discovering a Sermon: Personal Pastoral Preaching, pastoral theologian Robert
C. Dykstra explains that “our intentional efforts to make something important happen—to
make ourselves fall in love, say, or even to preach a riveting sermon—often prove futile and
detract from those unexpected trifles that bear far more potential for our hopes of intimacy or
for tasks of proclamation” (2001, p, 3). He then suggests an alternative: “Why not begin
instead by attending to what of interest just happens to us or by contemplating what intrigues
us?” (p. 3). The problem with this alternative, he explains, is that adults, especially ministers,
are often unable to recognize what interests them as a consequence of their own “painful
childhood deprivations” and “cultural or religious conventions that equate maturity with
relinquishing desire, and more expressly with renouncing childhood fascination with bodies
and their many pleasures” (p. 3).
To be sure, Dykstra’s insights on the significance of one’s desires and interests in writing a
sermon are applicable to many other creative endeavors and are relevant to practical theology,
including, of course, pastoral care (p. 2). In fact, there is a sense in which pastoral care, if it is
to be effective, must emerge from the caregiver’s interests and desires. Dykstra explains this
point bluntly: “Dismembered, spiritualized, or gnostic words—those that have somehow failed
to emerge from the therapist’s or preacher’s [or pastor’s] own felt sense of longing or desire—
will be incapable of untangling the costly attempts of others to turn their own passions into
something acceptable” (p. 54).
Desire as a point of departure for creative endeavors and for healing processes would seem
quite inappropriate, especially for those of us who were raised in religious cultures in which
desire was often equated with sin. The acceptable point of departure within some of these
traditions would be Scripture. But if we consider that Scripture’s point of departure is God’s
creative desire, and if the history of salvation is founded upon God’s redemptive desire, there is
no reason to sustain the apparent contradiction between desire and revelation. We desire
because God desired first: “We are, then, desiring beings, and it is in our desiring that we share
a likeness to God, for it was God’s nature to desire us even before we desired God” (Capps
2001, p. 58). Consequently, any understanding of salvation would be incomplete if it does not
incorporate the redemption of a person’s desires. Indeed, “effective healing in both psychotherapy and pastoral preaching seems regularly to depend on words that speak especially to
neglected sensual interests and desires of a person’s physical body” (Dykstra 2001, p. 54).
In view of my introductory remarks, my purpose in this paper is to find the kinds of words
that will address neglected interests and desires. To do so, I will first attend to that which is of
interest to me. I do not attempt, however, to offer a compilation of my interests and desires as if
my personal experiences could offer insight into the wide array of themes that constitute the
field of pastoral theology. Rather, I will focus on contemplating a few elements of my own
trajectory with the hope that in reflecting on these, I will be able to offer a few words of
Pastoral Psychol (2015) 64:297–310
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wisdom capable of helping others untangle some of the difficulty involved in turning passions
and desires into acceptable and life-giving forces.
Men look for food
A few weeks ago, I found myself interested in something apparently insignificant that
happened to me. As I was driving from Princeton Seminary to my home, I turned the radio
on and I heard the following affirmation: “Women look for retail therapy; men look for food.” I
have no idea who said this or why she said it, but I immediately realized that those words were
of interest to me and so I had to write them down before I forgot them. As soon as I parked my
car, I wrote down those words: Women look for retail therapy; men look for food. I could have
dismissed these sentences on the grounds that they appear to express sexist and essentializing
ideas. Instead, I decided to write them down and not renounce the possibility of finding some
truth through them. Since I am a man, I found myself especially interested in the second part of
the sentence: men look for food. Do men look for food? Does this imply that women do not
look for food or that men desire food more than women do? Having had a baby girl and a baby
boy, I would suggest that at least from the point of view of the nursing infant, I see no
difference between the desire of a hungry baby girl and that of a hungry baby boy. When I
think of my teen years in the dining hall of the Presbyterian Pan American High School in
Kingsville, Texas, I honestly could not say that my male classmates desired food more than the
girls did. Every Wednesday we were served Mexican tacos for lunch. Sara, who was to
become my wife years later, was always very hungry because of all the exercise she did. To
this day, she recalls with a certain pride how she could eat as many as 20 tacos on any given
Wednesday! Of course, the reality of this boarding preparatory school 50 years ago is not the
common panorama of teenage girls in the contemporary United States or of much of the world.
When it comes to food and women, we cannot longer pretend to see no difference. Do men
look for food more than women do? Do men desire food more than women do?
A feminist perspective
Emilio, my 10-year-old boy, loves Wendy’s hamburger called the Son of Baconator (Wendy’s,
of course, also offers the Baconator, a bigger hamburger for those with fatherly hunger).
Interestingly, these hamburgers were not christened by Wendy’s marketers the Daughter of the
Baconatoress and the Baconatoress. A Daughter of the Baconator hamburger would not sell,
perhaps because the marketing assumption is that daughters and mothers would rather eat a
salad or a chicken sandwich.
As I said before, this paper is about men, and as pastoral theologian James E. Dittes
explains, “The starting point for men is men, just as the starting point for women has been
women” (1996, p. xi). However, because the affirmation that men look for food may be
interpreted as implying that women do not look for food or that they do so with less desire,
before I go on with my reflection on men and our desire for food, I think it is important to offer
a few reflections on women and their desire for food. In her book The Fat Jesus: Feminist
Explorations in Boundaries and Transgressions, British theologian Lisa Isherwood contends
that “women are groomed to be nurturers and not to expect nurture” (2007, p. 99). This seems
to be true across many cultures, even in seemingly progressive Western cultures. Within the
Mexican context, the most common expectation is that women should prepare and serve meals
before they can eat. It is usually the mother, with the help of her oldest daughter, who prepares
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Pastoral Psychol (2015) 64:297–310
and serves meals. This practice, certainly not limited to the Mexican context, has significant
implications for the nurturing of women. First, an obvious consequence, especially in contexts
of poverty, is that women will simply not eat or will eat less because food is scarce and priority
is given to children and men. Secondly, some women may end up eating less as a consequence
of the cooking process itself. Because the smells of foods can partially satisfy the desire for
food, cooks often claim that after cooking they are no longer hungry or that their desire for
food has decreased. I have often heard my mother say that she enjoys food more when
someone else has prepared the meal. Thus, it isn’t that women have less desire for food but that
their “desires are taken over by society and moulded to fit what best suits the overarching
patriarchal model” (Isherwood 2007, p. 97).
The understanding of women as nurturers is not, of course, the only strategy of patriarchy to
control and mold women’s desires. From a very early age, girls receive the message that in
order to be beautiful they have to be thin. As a consequence of “the media bombardment of
their psyches,” women often seek to reshape their bodies at any cost (Isherwood 2007, p. 115).
Many of them will eventually reach the ideal of having a slim body, “but the ideal has to be
maintained through an eating disorder because the female body is not mean to be devoid of fat
and angular” (p. 115). At this point, Isherwood explains, women experience a profound
contradiction: “they have transformed themselves into objects of desire and at the same time
they believe they have control” (p. 115). But because women do not actually have power and
their needs remain unmet, they will often seek reassurance in the advice of experts who will
tell them what and when to eat (p. 115). Given this context, it is true, women do not look for
food (or at food) in the same way that men do. As Isherwood puts it, “Women around the
world, either through dieting cultures or because of the unequal distribution of food, are every
day the ones who do not get enough” (p. 134). Interestingly, women find in shopping an
apparent way to reclaim their subjectivity and connect with their desires (Young-Eisendrath
1999, p. 137). The problem is that “women are not in control of either the fashion industry or
other large retail enterprises” (p. 138). Furthermore, in exerting their subjectivity through
consumer choice, “women are often buying those things that make them more desirable as
objects of the male gaze” (Isherwood 2007, p. 116). Consequently, while shopping helps
women escape from the “resentment of having given personal control to others,” it fails to
wholly reclaim their subjectivity (p. 116).
Polly Young-Eisendrath, a psychologist and Jungian psychoanalyst, argues that, in order to
reclaim their subjectivity, women must resist the double bind of female beauty, that is, of being
either the “dreaded hag” or the “dangerous muse” (1999, pp. 51–52). She also contends that
women must be willing to experiment in order to escape the “dictates of our skinny cultural
muse” and develop “new ways of seeing and new images of being female”:
Most important, clothing, makeup, and public demeanor must no longer be translated
automatically so that patriarchal stereotypes abound: the fact that she’s wearing bib
overalls does not mean she’s lesbian. The fact that she doesn’t shave her legs does not
mean she’s a feminist. The fact that she’s wearing panty hose does not mean she’s a
housewife. The fact that she’s decorated with makeup and jewelry does not mean she’s
“cheap’ or some other version of slut. The fact that she’s wearing high heels does not
mean she wants men to look at her legs. . . . Being alert to the many, varied ways that
women can dress and be and act ensures that we do not automatically see a woman’s
expression of herself as a sign of a pat identity according to patriarchal rules….
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