Conor

“The poor man may envy the rich their houses, their lands, and their cars; but given a good wife, he rarely envies them their table.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection

“One intriguing piece of evidence suggests that Jesus may in fact have worked on the family farm as well as practising carpentry. Hegesippus, a 2nd-century writer, preserves the information that two grandsons of Jesus’ brother Judas were peasant farmers sharing a farm whose precise size was remembered. This must have been the family smallholding in Nazareth. The fact that they owned it jointly indicates that this family still followed the rather old-fashioned practice of not dividing the farm but keeping it as the common property of the extended family. Since Joseph had to provide for at least seven children (Jesus, his four brothers, and two or more sisters), he may well have taken up carpentry only to supplement the inadequate produce of the family farm. For this purpose, there would have been enough work within Nazareth.”
― Richard Bauckham, Jesus: A Very Short Introduction

“The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“Let us fast, then—whenever we see fit, and as strenuously as we should. But having gotten that exercise out of the way, let us eat. Festally, first of all, for life without occasions is not worth living. But ferially, too, for life is so much more than occasions, and its grand ordinariness must never go unsavored. But both ways let us eat with a glad good will, and with a conscience formed by considerations of excellence, not by fear of Ghosts.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection