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Lent’s penitential character reminds us that we’re called to something greater.
In her 1966 book Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas, one of the most important British anthropologists of the second half of the 20th century, described the “abominations” of Leviticus and Numbers in the Torah. She saw the Mosaic proscription against cloven-hoofed animals that didn’t chew the cud as a natural anomaly out of place in an ordered world. Thus, pork and rabbit meat were both dangerous and their rejection was an assertion of the holy.
In her later research, she rejected her original idea and instead and came to see the proscriptions of Leviticus and Numbers as more than a bunch of seemingly unrelated laws. In her 1970 book Natural Symbols, in the chapter entitled “The Bog Irish,” she made a strong pronouncement about the Catholic Church and the importance of ritual. She explained that Friday abstinence from meat “was the only ritual which brought Christian symbols down into the kitchen and on to the dinner table in the manner of Jewish rules of impurity.”
Continued below.
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In her 1966 book Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas, one of the most important British anthropologists of the second half of the 20th century, described the “abominations” of Leviticus and Numbers in the Torah. She saw the Mosaic proscription against cloven-hoofed animals that didn’t chew the cud as a natural anomaly out of place in an ordered world. Thus, pork and rabbit meat were both dangerous and their rejection was an assertion of the holy.
In her later research, she rejected her original idea and instead and came to see the proscriptions of Leviticus and Numbers as more than a bunch of seemingly unrelated laws. In her 1970 book Natural Symbols, in the chapter entitled “The Bog Irish,” she made a strong pronouncement about the Catholic Church and the importance of ritual. She explained that Friday abstinence from meat “was the only ritual which brought Christian symbols down into the kitchen and on to the dinner table in the manner of Jewish rules of impurity.”
Continued below.
Fast and Abstain for the Sake of Your Soul
Lent’s penitential character reminds us that we’re called to something greater.
