First I would like to thank Todd Ream for his kind invitation to participate in the online discussion of my Inside Higher Ed article, “In Praise of Lunch,” appearing in Christian Scholars Review, and its editor-in-chief, Perry Glanzer.
Secondly, I’m deeply grateful to Tim Muehlhoff, Christopher Gehrz, and Jenell Paris, the three scholars who so thoughtfully commented on my essay, and challenged me to think further about what I wrote in my essay based, as it was, on the commencement speech I delivered to the 2024 graduates of my alma mater, La Salle University, in Philadelphia.
My greatest fear was that my interlocutors would discover my essay to be, in culinary terms, thin gruel, thereby leading to an empty exchange. But, no, each scholar managed to extract enough insight from “In Praise of Lunch” to establish the basis for an engaging and productive exchange.
Continuing the conversation, I would like to focus on an especially thoughtful insight from each of the three posts:
–Tim Muehlhoff’s observation that lunch, as I described it, is really a ritual, and that thinking about it as such sheds greater light on its value as a regular setting for stronger social engagement.
–Christopher Gehrz’s insight that faculty lunches at Bethel College promote the “interconnectedness of knowledge” in the Christian tradition.
–And Jenell Paris’s observation that I failed to consider the costs of lunch–not in financial terms–but the cost in terms of time, trouble, and inconvenience (what economists would call “opportunity costs”).
Each in turn (and in the spirit of conversation I’ve taken the liberty to use first names in my responses):
–Tim Muehlhoff: Drawing on the scholarly communications literature, Tim Muehlhoff specifies a critical distinction between communication as transmission of information, in which many of us heave data at each other to no good effect, and the ritual version of communication in which we cultivate bonds with each other, locating lunch as a setting for building such bonds, even for people who deeply disagree. Tim, then, ingeniously identifies the U. S. Supreme Court’s group lunch as a model of a medium for greater communication among colleagues who often (and radically) disagree with one another but who still must work together in a common purpose. Leaders seeking to improve the work of their organizations and their employees’ sense of fulfillment would do well to take a page from Tim’s post and look at the company dining room, and how it is used, in a new way.
–Christopher Gehrz: Departing the Supreme Court, Christopher Gehrz takes us to the cinder block-lined faculty dining center of Bethel College where, in the 80s, Eleanor Erdman, founding chair of Bethel’s BA nursing program, encouraged her faculty to have lunch with the rest of the academics to more fully engage with their institution’s culture. While the space occupied by the faculty dining room eventually fell to other uses, historian Gehrz recalls the old faculty lunches fondly, noting especially their “bridging” capital, that is, their value in connecting scholars across disparate fields. He later observes that it would take relatively little effort to regroup scholars over a meal “that can embody a core for any Christian university: the interconnectedness of knowledge.”
That phrase jumped out at me because it brought to mind the ideas at the heart of the organization where I’ve been working the past couple of years, the American Philosophical Society. The APS was proposed in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, who insisted that it be what we would describe today as a multidisciplinary organization, with members representing at least seven different fields. Franklin strategically enlisted eating and drinking (lunch, by any other name) for encouraging conversation around the Society’s stated purpose of “promoting useful knowledge.” Nearly three centuries later, the APS regularly renews its roots at its semi-annual meetings where Franklin’s eating and drinking rituals hold center stage in joining physicists with poets and poets with physicists.
–Jenell Paris: When I first looked at the title of anthropologist Jenell Paris’s post, “An Empirical Examination of Dougherty’s Unified Field Theory of Lunch,” I thought to myself, “well, that’s what I get for embellishing my otherwise simple talk with a high-falutin’ name.” I’m grateful to Jenell (and her students) for putting my theory under their social-scientific microscope and doing so in such a light-hearted but constructive way. The data point that jumped out from the Messiah empirical examination was that of cost–not financial cost, but cost in terms of time and energy. Jenell exemplifies this concern by explaining that recently she replied to a colleague’s luncheon invitation by saying that she was able to find an available hour (possibly 45 minutes) three weeks after receiving the invitation.
And so we confront the curse of opportunity cost, the economists’ term for the price we pay for pursuing one option over another. This problem governs not only Jenell’s schedule, but that of the U.S. Supreme Court justices, the Bethel College faculty, the American Philosophical Society membership, and almost everybody else. Our servitude to screens only raises the opportunity cost of a good lunch.
My response to this very palpable concern is to turn it on its head, and to say that the cost of missing lunch is calculated in our sometimes unnecessary technological and bureaucratic entanglements. They cost us our soulful social culture.
–Concluding comments: After reading and contemplating these most thoughtful posts, I’ve come to think more of lunch on two levels:
First, at a practical level, my commentators have reinforced my conviction that we just need to figure out how to find the time for a club sandwich and an iced tea and some good conversation, and do so more often. They are their own just desserts.
Second, at a spiritual level, they instructed me in how the ritual of lunch restores our sociability, both by binding us closer to our like-minded friends and bridging our differences with those with whom we differ. An important insight I gleaned from the posts is that the framing matters. By framing I mean a conversational structure: just as Bethel faculty have their Christian intellectual tradition, the Supreme Court justices have law, APS members have useful knowledge, we editors and authors have our books.
These purposeful frames foreground the rituals in which differences can be bridged and resentments relaxed (possibly even in Congress!). Without this ritual context, lunch is merely fast food. Finding the right frames is key.
