LJWorld.com

Tim O'Brien, surrounded by fruits and vegetables near a busy Lawrence thoroughfare, feels close to God.

The garden at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, which O'Brien helps to organize at 1234 Ky., is a little piece of cultivated earth amid a plain of pavement. There are hollyhocks, tomatoes, sunflowers, tomatillos, grapes and many other plants in the garden, which is divided in 3-by-10-foot sections among church parishioners.

"God made the Earth and found it is good," says O'Brien, quoting the Bible's Book of Genesis. "We should find it's good, too."

That's the basic premise behind "Culinary Culture," a weekly lecture series that starts next week at Signs of Life, 722 Mass., and runs through December.

Series sessions, which will be 7:30 p.m. Mondays, will examine many cultural aspects of the food we eat, including religion, social benefits of eating and economic impacts of food production.

It starts with a lecture by O'Brien on Christian stewardship as it relates to farming and ranching.

"They talk about the sanctity of life," he says of many Christians, "but they're not doing a very good job taking care of the Earth and each other. You could say that with secular eyes or in a religious context."

Earth cultivators

Josh Ney, the coffee shop manager at Signs of Life who organized the series, says Lawrence is the perfect place to have a conversation about the religious and moral implications of food.

It's big enough to feel like an urban area, he says, but small enough to know the local producers at the Lawrence Farmers Market by name.

"There's something about Lawrence," Ney says. "It's unique, really. Knowing about your food isn't just a lifestyle."

The spiritual implications of food are many, Ney says. He points to the Bible's Book of Genesis, in which God makes the Earth, as a guide.

"The directive in creation is that all things are good," Ney says. "God created men and women to go into the world and cultivate it. It's a tender issue because there are two trains of thought - that man is here to dominate the world and manipulate the world, or that we're husbands or cultivators of the land, that we see creation as a brother and not an enemy."

For many, that means looking for organic produce or, in some cases, even growing their own food to protect the land. It also could mean advocating against harmful farming techniques or, from a social justice perspective, taking a stand against low wages of migrant workers who pick many fruits and vegetables.

Soul nourishment

Caring for the land certainly is an issue many people can come together on, even if they aren't Christian or religious at all.

Of course, some religions do focus on dietary laws as part of their tenets.

"For many Jews, observing kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws, is a way of raising their eating habits to a spiritual level," says Rabbi Debbie Stiel of the Lawrence Jewish Community Center, 917 Highland Drive. "Some follow these laws because they believe that this is what God wants them to do. Others may keep some level of kosher observance because they find it to be a meaningful way to express their Jewish identity."

Like Ney, Stiel points to Genesis as the source for understanding how to care for the land. Also, she says, early rabbinic writings say "without flour there is no Torah, and without Torah there is no flour."

"In other words, both are types of sustenance," Stiel explains. "We need both, and each help us to be able to have the other. I think Jews have always seen a connection between these two. We believe it is important to have foods that are nourishing and filled with love and also important to have the nourishment of the soul that is received through study and prayer."

Other religions have similar concepts.

Like Judiasm, Muslims have dietary restrictions - they can't eat pork, alcohol or gelatin, among other things. Hindus don't eat beef, and the most devout avoid all meat and alcohol as well.

Buddhist tradition involves the idea of mindful eating, that people should focus on what they're eating and not just wolf it down. Many practice vegetarianism, too.

'Religious sturdiness'

The idea that faith and food intersect certainly isn't a new one, says Caleb Stegall, a Perry attorney who is writing a book on the history of Kansas populism.

Politics, faith, agriculture and the social dynamics of society have always been intertwined, he says.

"I think that the idealized, sort of Jeffersonian vision was always tied into a religious sturdiness of the common people - they were people of faith who understood they were limited human beings and there was a God," Stegall says. "They relied a lot on their faith as it related to their economic activities. In an agricultural society, you have to depend on things that are out of your control."

But that's changed as the family farm has given way to big business, Stegall says.

"The argument would run that, when you lose that religious and democratic sturdiness, the populace is far more dependent and unaware of that dependence (on big farms) in some sense, and it tends toward political apathy and cynicism," Stegall says. "One of the ironies in this is the more dependent we get, we feel this deep hankering for something they're missing."

'Moral Act'

And that's why gardeners such as O'Brien, who grows much of his own food at his home in North Lawrence, are seeing a resurgence.

He quotes the oft-cited motto, "Eating is a Moral Act," when talking about food.

The analogies of having a garden at St. John's - comparisons like cultivating faith, and the Garden of Eden - aren't lost on parishioners, O'Brien says. The church has held prayer services among the plants in the past.

"Sure, we've produced a lot of food," O'Brien says. "But people have found fellowship here, and they've learned a lot about gardening and specific plants. There are so many references in both the Old and New Testaments about how everything belongs to the earth, and it's no ours to use and abuse."