January 2, 2007

Book Review: Gluttony

The other night I finished Francine Prose's Gluttony. As I mentioned last week, I received the whole series of seven for Christmas. I enjoyed it and thought it was a good treatment. It goes into the Biblical and patristic roots, and how our sense of the sin has changed over time.

She also does a good job in showing how, in contrast to many classical sins, gluttony is still a sin in modern, secular society; how all of the complex and mixed doctrines about food and the body, combined with food being urged upon us at every turn, has turned everyone just a little bit crazy, and some of us a lot crazy.

The only thing I found annoying about the book is that the otherwise lovely color plates do not correspond to the paintings that are actually discussed in the text.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Faithful, or even just thoughtful criticisms are always welcome. Uninformed rudeness to other posters or to the Lord and His Church is not.

I also reserve the right to reject comments promoting things like private revelations and fringe points of view, if it seems to me like they are being presented in a misleading way.

If you raise a disagreement with something I say but I do not respond, please do not feel slighted or insulted, or imagine that this automatically means I disagree or agree with you. It's just that I don't find the comment box to be a constructive medium for certain forms of debate.