For Here or To Go?
Stephen H. Webb's Good Eating
Preston Jones
October 1, 2001
Good Eating, by Stephen H. Webb (Brazos Press, 2001), 272 pp. For today's lesson in modern living we turn to north Dallas, the de facto capital of dispensational premillennialism, a town full of basically decent people who are eager for the archangel's trumpet to sound and for the faithful few to be snatched away, eternally, from this bad, bad world. Oddly enough, when worked out in daily affairs, the premillennialist's disposition toward this wretched existence makes real life even worse for the rest of us. Call it trickle-down pop theology. We Dallasites express our longing for the Pearly Gates by driving recklessly (for us, turn signals are the automotive equivalent of pointless spleens); we express our disregard for the material world by making recycling absurdly difficult; and, double-fisting fried chicken and other dainties, we wax fat (literally), and thus give already skyrocketing health care costs an added boost. Were Wabash College professor Stephen Webb to announce in Dallas that the kingdom of heaven could be more nearly approximated by vegetarianism than by frequent pilgrimages to the sacred temples of Colonel Sanders, he'd be laughed out of town. And yet I want the man to know that there is at least one double-talker whom Good Eating has struck between the greedy eyes. "Babe," I said to my wife as we headed off to dinner, "we've got to get back to eating only free-range meat." "You've been reading that Webb book," she responded, though the intonation of her voice indicated that she, too, recalled our days in northern California where much of what we ate was produced by local farmers who treated their animals like creatures invented by God, not like machines. There was something satisfying and counter-cultural about ...
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