Introduction
In the book “Heaven’s Kitchen: Living Religion at God’s Love We Deliver” by Bender, the author traces back to a period when she was working in a non-profit association called “God’s Love We Deliver.” In the organization, the author and other volunteers used to help people living with AIDS, including cooking meals for them. The writer aims to answer questions such as how people engage in religion daily and how meeting people with varying religious beliefs contribute to comprehending spiritual and moral lives (De Haardt, 2017, p. 64). Faith reshapes people’s comprehension of religion’s role, enabling them to engage in various activities without expecting rewards. Though religion is a crucial element that enables Christians and non-Christians to engage in actions that encourage humanity, such as delivering food to the unprivileged, serving humanity does not imply one has to be religious.
The novelist assesses how they devoted their mundane practices and conversations, including cooking, with a hidden meaning that later influenced how the author and workmates perceived their spiritual lives. This book premises smart restatement of society and religious questions in sensible ways, including how religion attracts people to conduct religious activities. Under obvious objections, the author debate that the areas that lack religion provide room for understanding when and how individuals experience and enact their communal lives (De Haardt, 2017, p. 70). The author’s argument is a good reply, even if it does not find how the organization enacts or expresses religious actions. According to Bender, religion was limited to attending church, preparing holidays, and participating in groups. Volunteers regarded Manhattan non-profit organization teams such as the pope or conservative Christians as antithetical or extreme to the true religious spirit.
The author establishes more religious activities than talks, including cooking for the dying, viewed as a religious activity in church or secular voluntary organizations. This book highpoints boundaries, limits, and absences, not a cruel accomplishment in ethnographic writing, but misses large frames that indicate and contribute to the understanding of why voluntarism is vital (Bender, 2003, p. 58). For instance, among the strongest section of this manuscript is the material involved from in-depth volunteer interviews, enabling leaders to learn more about the religious practices that design volunteering. Individuals also get to learn about the religious discourses that offer to mean to religion, how volunteers regard kitchen activities as religious and how they perceive negotiations as secular while doing religious practices.
Volunteers learn interesting information when they engage in religious practices even though they are not linked to the bigger discussion of the religious pluralism issues in public settings. The author has not explored the reasons for religious talk and practices limitations and in-depth pluralism analysis (De Haardt, 2017, p. 60). The author argues that religion is specifically unimportant due to the relationship between homosexuality and AIDS and various religious squads have a homosexuality condemnation history. In such settings, religious talks and religious people may be considered problematic by other people (Bender, 2003, p. 58). However, the more religious expressions are not practiced, the more people get their freedom to practice religion. The author introduces social order and socialization in chapters three and four to enhance religion studies.
Socialization denotes the act of adapting a community’s standards, while social order denotes a society’s orderliness. People inherit social systems rather than creating them; Bender volunteers work in an NGO to explore how religion is associated among various volunteers. One of the volunteers got distracted when one man approached her and told her about his AIDS status. Libby approached one of the chefs and told them concerning the man’s status and questioned the man’s presence, but was told that the kitchen aimed to provide food for such people (Bender, 2003, p. 58). Libby was not comfortable being around a person living with AIDS, even if the chances of Libby getting the disease through being in the same room with the man were very low. The instant discomfort and acts of revealing the man’s status by one of the volunteers imply that she never volunteered to work in the hotel.
Bender earlier explores how volunteers could not engage in any activity that could reveal the status of an individual diagnosed with AIDS since the act could stimulate their harassment and stigma. Bender positions GLWD’s distribution offers could not dress GLWD baseball caps, AIDS streamers, or AIDS Pace T-shirts when they acquired hot teatimes to receivers’ homes (Bender, 2003, p. 45). The kitchen could do unknown that could give away their client’s health position. Ethically speaking, it is disgraceful that humanity had such a robust dishonor on AIDs identified persons, including all the delusions neighboring the sickness. Even if it is somewhat that one cannot fully comprehend or realize, that does not mean they should undergo unadorned ruling on another. Though with that alleged, it was morally precise for the unpaid worker of “God’s Love We Deliver” to not brand it apparent that a person certainly had AIDS because of the world’s humiliation in dwelling.
Summary
“Heaven’s Kitchen: Living Religion at God’s Love We Deliver” majorly addresses people living in contemporary America. The manuscript particularly discourses the workers working in a non-profit, non-religious organization, where the author prepared and distributed food for homebound publics with AIDS. The author’s purpose in writing the book includes knowing how individuals rehearse faith in their daily lives. The author also explores how day-to-day meetings with folks with distinct religious beliefs determine how people understand their moral and spiritual lives. The book is engaged with rich hypothetical and vivacious storytelling visions that engage readers and prove religion’s essence to readers. The author’s debates indicate that faith is an existing activity and reshapes people’s comprehension of religion’s role in modern American life. The author used her observations to reflect on how spiritual and religious matters are invested daily.
Chapter One, “Decorating Holiday Bags at the Friends Seminary, Making Dinner in the Kitchen,” investigates religion in daily life and looks at dissatisfaction with recent arguments about the nature of religious life in contemporary America. It targets generating some reflections on how spiritual matters and religion are made obvious in public actions and statements. Enlightening these activities and practices in daily life will positively bring fresh perceptions concerning the religiousness of Americans (Bender, 2003, p. 56). Some of these issues curtailed notions about the dwindling place of religion in the urban life of Americans. Urban areas are on many occasions, have been viewed as singularly lacking religious zeal.
The debate concerning vague spiritual talk about displacing other religious talk creates an interesting accompaniment to previous studies about the dynamic role of religious institutions in empowering religious discourse. The conviction was extended to the kitchenette and established as a reality by unpaid assistants who had conflicting religious settings and comprehensions of how they intended to exercise religion there. Religious practices have gained huge attention in modern times under the heading “lived religion.” The idiom highlights a shift from the dualistic distinctions between official and popular, private and public, individual and institutional religion to a closer analysis of their associations.
Chapter Two, “The Meals Are the Message: God’s Love We Deliver,” archives God’s Love We Deliver’s (GLWD) physical and cultural expansion from its roots till its field research in 1994.GLWD established its formal collections to respond to particular constraints and situations within specific social situations. “Food is love” continued to draw donors, capture volunteers’ imaginations, and influence how GLWD carried out its matters, even after “food is therapy” became an essential interpretative repertoire (Bender, 2003, p. 78). GLWD’s revolution in the nine years was no “wonder” irrespective of its remarkable development from grassroots society to a multifaceted service body.
GLWD utilized the existing social connections and formed new ones, hence increasingly juggling several explanations of its message as it traversed these networks and supporting streams. Hence, God’s Love We Deliver marked a revolution of love from verbal assurances to personified demonstrations that God provides for individuals on the verge of dying. This book initially drew the signs of loving food from the dimension of gourmet, fantastic restaurant meals. The association between love and restaurant-quality meals was illustrative of various aspects of God’s Love We Deliver‘s purpose and its connection to its customers.
In chapter three, “Getting the Meals Out: The Daily Life of The Kitchen,” volunteers are given a chance to preserve their stories and ideas about the significance of cooking for people living with AIDS. To some extent, chefs and volunteers focused on what was required to prepare meals for eight hundred individuals, and several interpretations of kitchen chores- whether spiritual, political, or aesthetic remained concealed. The kitchen’s collective culture concentrated on getting the meals out. The chant, “as long as the meals get out,” claimed aching backs and flaring tempers as it offered a potent objective that over all types of personality differences. A board of health inspectors visited God’s Love We Deliver just as they did to various other restaurants; therefore, the agency reserved a kitchen consultant to countercheck unannounced checks on kitchen sanitation.
Chapter four, “Religious Practice in the Kitchen,” discusses how four volunteers define their spiritual agency through stories regarding themselves and their role at God’s Love We Deliver. Interviews were crucial windows into the volunteers’ religious, political, civic, and personal commitments. Interviews by nature illustrate the limited capability to determine “meaning” despite giving some sense of the connections and associations people draw on to elucidate their actions. Analytical comprehension of religious experience has cast off the important aspects of initial phenomenology in the past years. This conceptualization proposes that religion arises or descends into ordinary lives. Thus, an individual is inevitably religious at the core, in favor of relational or constructivist interpretations.
The manner volunteers narrated the story of their religious activities and in the kitchen leads to further analysis of the American distinction between ‘spiritual’ and ‘religious’ things. Seeing religiousness as a mindful act rather than an advancement of the background highlighted their other volunteers’ various spiritual and religious views. Chapter five, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Religion,” examines how daily actions and conversations helped people gain their footing (De Haardt, 2017, p. 50). It is necessary to analyze any public discussion about religion. This chapter specifies the attempts of volunteers to extend the talk about responsibility, duty past daily speech genres, and morality. Several talks about religion proceeded in distinct ways, including preparing for holidays, satire or parody, and going to church.
Talk on holidays and church developed when volunteers discussed their daily plans and were involved in satire and parody when the political events and media focused on religious groups. Many volunteers participated in religious traditions during family life occasions and holidays elaborated on their frequent frustrating and difficult loyalties to tradition and family (Bender, 2003, p. 55). Volunteers discussed embarking on the synagogues and churches by intertwining their religious connections into the particulars of interactions about various things. They hence developed their religious identities in daily chatter about plans and schedules. In chapter six, “Doing Something about AIDS,”several people have written the conspiracy of silence” engulfing death in the American tradition.
Bereavement and grief are significantly confined in public funerary and then contained within therapeutic surroundings. Based on these cultural silences, the lack of talk concerning death in the kitchen was unimportant. AIDS soared like a threat in the volunteers’ concerns about contamination and blood, in arguments and allusions about food quality and several other ways. Volunteers seldom gestured their engagement with the medical and social treatment of individuals living with AIDS (Bender, 2003, p. 72). However, the degree of this silence and the fastidiousness of deaths related to AIDS created the pat clarifications about Americans’ disappointment to talk about demise unsatisfactory. The silence of the volunteers about AIDS was deliberate; their refusal to speak formed and maintained a tradition in which they could do something concerning AIDS.
Analysis
In composing this book, Bender uses the background of the non-profit, non-religious organization where she used to work as a volunteer. Offering help does not necessarily mean that a person has to be a Christian or practice religion to qualify to contribute aid to the sick or needy. Bender, who was working in a non-religious organization as a volunteer, and other workmates decided to offer food to the individuals affected by HIV/AIDS. Bender’s decision depicts acting with humanity does not require one to be spiritual; whether sacred or not, serving can happen in any place.
According to the interactionist perspective theory of sociology, it is souls’ behaviors that describe who they are. Bender’s actions in looking after the people living with AIDS who were being stigmatized reveal how religious she was even though she was not working in a religious organization; her actions are apparent. When folks are with their friends, family members, or neighbors, they rarely talk about religious matters. Bender used to hold talks with staff members on how they should offer help to the people with HIV/AIDS and other individuals undergoing hard times. Most entities only focus on movies, politics, sports, and television, undermining religion (Bender, 2003, p. 60). While Bender worked in the non-profit organization supplying food, she never heard other workers talking about religious matters.
Religion was much excluded from what the volunteers were talking about or the activities they were engaging in. Individuals need to pay attention to what they engage in daily and how they talk since their activities or conversations depict who they are. This book highlights to readers how religious matters happen in non-religious settings and gives bibliophiles knowledge concerning religious matters when working voluntarily or interacting with their colleagues (Bender, 2003, p. 12). Emphasizing how daily actions and thoughts shape sacred experiences enables people to engage in practices that encourage religionism. For example, the kitchen helpers at “God’s Love We Deliver” (GLWD) never shared a similar religious worldview or background but assumed religion.
Practicing and exploring religion entails playing various roles, including making food in the kitchen, proving for the stingy, and not building shared religious cultures. Daily conversations concerning crucial activities and how helpers behave depend on their daily actions, demonstrating how they perceive religious identities. Individuals should play religious and cultural roles to embrace maxim consequences sociological writings emphasize (Thompson, 2017, p. 350). Generally, individuals are aware of their shared cultures when engaging in daily practices. Individuals tend to focus on the actions of the shared symbols to make sense of the world.
Volunteers only share much when cooking but not when engaging in religious matters. Despite the absence of shared culture, volunteers communicate among themselves across their perceived differences. Hence, Bender suggests that mutual incomprehension ensured meaning are among the process and strategies that enhance communication with volunteers. According to the first chapter, religion is a practice, and the public should avoid asking common questions, including whether a person volunteering is religious (Bender, 2003, p. 58). Hence, religion is an attribute individuals use to translate their differences; it is a set of values learned through religious communities or self-guided and carried by people’s egos to their surroundings. Since it is nearly impossible to learn what people think, it is never easy to translate actions or establish people’s views over time.
Individuals acknowledge how ordinary events impact their religious activities when practicing religion. Shifting towards religious views allows people to engage in creative religious actions as modern Americans live. Bender avoided asking whether the volunteers were religious to comprehend how the activities they experience mold their identity, practice, and religious ideas. Cooking for people living with AIDS and holding small talks contributes to understanding the spiritual and religious life (Bender, 2003, p. 67). More changes have been done from national, regional, and local perspectives, which give people the chance to speak various languages learned in local societies. However, modern America negatively describes religion, decreasing civic and religious companies. Even though individuals find it hard talking about religious matters publicly, their actions best define them.
Studying religious talks and practices at GLWD relieved the restrictions concerning shared cultures since it prohibited volunteers from sharing religions, sentiments, and identities. Sharing enables individuals to achieve their objectives, and hence the things the volunteers avoided sharing posed a danger and struggle among them. How individuals engage in their daily practices depicts how religious they are. At GLWD, volunteers conveyed activities to the kitchen, which enabled them to draw expectations of structures of social interactions from other backgrounds (Bender, 2003, p. 58). Their practices of delivering food enabled volunteers to acquire real and important information. However, their evaluations and interpretations in the kitchen implied they were against uniting people living with AIDS.
Assigning new and complex actions complicates how well individuals convey or deliver something. Engaging in or thinking about religion makes people believe that the world is categorized into mundane and sacred spheres. This opinion, originating in the classical sociology theory, has pushed sociologists to assume that religion occurs in the church (Dingley, 2018, p. 30). At the same time, business happens at work, family life at home, among others. Institutions compartmentalizing extends to involve mental orientations, enabling people to utilize and understand various cultures. Therefore, food delivery among the people living with AIDS is evidence that reveals how people practice religious activities in their daily lives.
The writer brings religion to the kitchen and makes the reality there using individual volunteers with different understandings and religious backgrounds. The author explores how most people have engaged in religious practices in the current era, shifting the attention of binary distinctions between official and popular, private and public, individuals and institutional religions to their interactions. Using the meals to reveal religious matters in GLWD permitted volunteers to preserve their memories and ideas concerning what was vital when cooking or conveying food to the individuals affected with AIDS. Chefs and volunteers focused on what was appropriate to package and make meals for more people and most kitchen work interpretations, whether spiritual, political, or aesthetic; their status remained hidden. A group of inspectors toured God’s Love We Deliver just like other restaurant kitchens; thus, the institution reserved a consultant to conduct unexpected counterchecks on kitchen sanitation.
Devout people hardly show their political affiliations with matters related to social life. Nevertheless, silence and the exactitude of AIDS-based deaths perfectly explained Americans’ failure to discuss death. The silence of volunteers about AIDS was deliberate; hence their rebuff to speak about it resulted in a culture whereby they could perform any action about AIDS while making a space lacking speech genre to which debates about AIDS could be indirectly related. The author uses descriptive and diagnostic analysis to analyze data since the two methods have enabled the author to identify the activities that had already occurred concerning religious matters and focus on why the activities were occurring (Ballarin, 2021, p. 27). Through descriptive analysis, the author knew how people were engaging in religion every day and how meeting people with varying religious beliefs contributed to comprehending spiritual and moral lives.
The author contends that religion is insignificant due to the association between AIDS and homosexuality, which may be regarded as challenging by other individuals. People were not only practicing religious practices when in religious settings but were also practicing religion in non-religious settings, including when in their homes. Different beliefs impact people’s moral values, including teaching people the importance of sharing meals with individuals affected with AIDS since the diseases could not transmit through sharing meals. The author contradicts her aim of writing the book; she only focuses on sharing food with people affected by AIDS. She forgets to explore other activities that enhance religion and how mixing or interacting with more people impacts religious practices. The author has left information concerning the motives for spiritual talk and follows confines and in-depth diversity analysis.
Evaluation
The author has attained her goal of knowing how people engage in religion daily and how meeting people with varying religious beliefs contribute to comprehending spiritual and moral lives. By providing food to people living with AIDS, the author learns that not only the people who engage or know more about religion can share their food with others since other non-religious people volunteered to share food. The author learned that interacting with other people impacts an individual’s moral values since people discriminate against people living with AIDS while others treat them fairly.
The book is convincing since it enables readers to know the activities that encourage religion and discourage religion, such as stigmatization. Readers get to learn that sharing should be paramount without considering other people’s health status or condition (Frase et al., 2019, p. 60). However, the book is biased since the author takes religion out of the apostolic and validates what people imply when they practice religion beautifully and convincingly. Heaven’s Kitchen is a convincing story, craftily told; nevertheless, it corresponds to a vivid analysis of ordinary religious does that shoves people to contemplate new habits around where and in what way to aspect for religion.
The author has not provided adequate utilization of evidence when making arguments. For instance, the author has not provided enough evidence to reveal other ways people engage in religious matters apart from cooking or food. The author’s structure concerning ideas is appropriate since the author has explained step by step how sociologists were eager to know how religion is practiced and volunteered to work GLWD delivering food as an act of showing religionism (Bender, 2003, p. 40). The author has provided exaggerating evidence that indicates religious matters happen in the kitchen alone or via sharing food. The author has not considered religion as part of sharing other things such as clothing and shelter, which are among the basic requirements of an individual.
Some of the strengths of this book include having a clear language that people easily comprehend. The book also has an engaging plot and a satisfying ending that makes the leaders judge whether the writer achieved the book’s purpose. The weaknesses of this book include being too derivative since it discusses most of the things readers are aware of, such as discrimination against people living with AIDS. The book contains unrealistic details such as the delivering food daily without mentioning where the volunteers were obtaining the funds and lacks images that could engage readers. Consequently, the book should be read by school-going children since it contains a friendly language and will help the children learn more about humanity and how they should treat other people in the society.
Conclusion
Religion entices people to behaviors that involve religious activities such as delivering food for individuals. Not only religious people engage in religious activities, but also the non-religious. Religious activities do not necessarily require to occur in religious settings, but an individual can also engage in religious practices in any setting. Volunteers did not participate in various obvious debates about critical, meaningful ways, but claimed the task they accomplished together was self-evidently crucial and worth. At times, the degree of arguments that exploded minor kitchen procedure issues pointed to comprehending how practice and talk functioned in the kitchen. This twist of daily indirect talk and speech genre about religion in the kitchen proposes that daily talk and religious practices are far from vague and diffuse.
Reference List
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