I found this interesting... 

http://www.thegreatgiveaway.blogspot.com/

Thursday, August 31, 2006

What Jerry Falwell, Zizek and Obesity Can Teach us about Our Evangelical Holiness Codes

A couple of days ago (Aug 25, 2006), Chicago Sun Times religion columnist Cathleen Falsani wrote a piece entitled “Weighty Matter: Is religion making us fat?” (http://www.suntimes.com/output/falsani/cst-nws-fals25a.html). In the piece, she recited Adam Ant’s lyrics in the 80’s “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do ya do?” She raised the question whether those Christian denominations that prohibit drinking and smoking were not in fact doing what was left to do: abusing food as substitute for these other prohibited pleasures. In support of this, Falsani quotes Ken Ferraro’s study from Purdue University that studied churches as the potential feeding ground for the problem of obesity and gluttony in North America. Published in the June issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, this study concluded (after accounting for several other factors) that some kinds of churches seem to encourage the problem of obesity. Ferraro in fact states that churches where drinking alcohol, smoking anything and even dancing are vices, “overeating has become the accepted vice.”…

Yeah, David Fitch has an excellent blog concerning conversations on church, evangelicalism, and postmodernity (as the title says).  His latest blog on Protestants leaving Protestantism for "high church" is excellent as well.  He sees it as a sort of musical chairs, i.e. RC leaving for Reform and then those splitting and so on.  Now we have evangelicals going the other way and he really doesn't think we should or even can because well, do we ever really "leave" or "break from" our past?  Fitch proposes that we "stay put" and that by doing so we will be able to bring some of those high church ideas into the Protestant churches that so desparately need them.  According to Fitch this could very well be a new ecumenicalism on the horizon.  Good stuff coming from that guy.