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Power Failure
Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology by Albert Borgmann Brazos Press, 2003 144 pp. $11.99 
The Supper of the Lamb
The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Entertainment by Robert Farrar Capon Modern Library, 2002 320 pp. $9.56 |
Many Christian retreat centers of a certain age have a library, typically furnished with understuffed sofas and chairs whose donors threw in several boxes of books while they were loading the station wagon. A few years ago I was browsing the dusty shelves in such a room, compulsively trying to fill a time set aside for silent prayer and Bible study, but not finding much to hold my interest among the earnest 1960s-era paperbacks. Then I saw something unusual—a hardback, published by Doubleday, in the dingy condition of a book that had been bought a long time ago but never read.
The book's author was the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon, whose trilogy on the parables had recently been driving me back to the gospels with fresh curiosity. I sat down and didn't get up again until several hours later, having read the book twice. It was the first Christian cookbook I'd ever read, The Supper of the Lamb.
Capon's book is, quite literally, about a lamb supper, or more precisely, "Lamb for Eight Persons Four Times," a series of meals to be made from one freshly butchered animal. But it is also a rollicking theological argument—with another Supper always on the horizon—for the well-set table as the epicenter of grace. Capon takes the side of cream over calorie-counting, wine over weight-watching, and feasting, fasting, and even "ferial" eating over the mechanized, Cool Whip-and-cake mix approach to food. (An incorrigibly playful writer, Capon revives the medieval distinction between "festal" and "ferial"—a feria being a weekday when no feast is celebrated—to contrast everyday cooking with Sunday brunch and Thanksgiving dinner. For Capon, as for the medievals, the more festal days the better.) An entire chapter is devoted to the experience of slicing an onion.
I've never actually made any of the recipes in The Supper of the Lamb. I have hopes of being alive to see my fortieth birthday, and Capon's ancienne cuisine, heavy on butter and sherry, would give the American Heart Association a, well, you know. But I've hardly cooked a meal since without imagining Father Capon looking over my shoulder, commenting on my knife technique and urging me to have another glass of wine.
Why begin an essay on philosopher Albert Borgmann by singing the praises of The Supper of the Lamb? For several reasons, I suppose, the first being that while Borgmann is a philosopher, Capon is a writer, and if this essay actually moves any readers to carve out time for another book in their busy lives, they will have more fun reading Capon than Borgmann, and will absorb many of Borgmann's essential insights at no extra charge. The second being that Capon's book is back in print, thanks to the Modern Library, and the diligent can still find copies of a beautiful hardcover edition that was issued several years ago by Smithmark Publishing. The third being that I still haven't gotten over the delight of discovering that one of Borgmann's principal conversation partners in his imposingly titled 1984 book, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry, is none other than Robert Farrar Capon and his book The Supper of the Lamb.
Supper, it turns out, has a lot to do with Borgmann's philosophical project. He has made his mark as a philosopher of technology, beginning with his programmatic 1984 book and continuing with 1992's Crossing the Postmodern Divide and 1999's Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. Borgmann's recurring theme is what he calls the "invisibility" of technology in contemporary culture: he wants us to see the ways in which it subordinates nearly every other cultural practice, from the dinner table to democracy, to its controlling assumptions.
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