Light Theology and Heavy Cream: The Culinary Adventures of Pietro and Madeline: The Culinary Adventures of Pietro and Madeleine

Given the irony of a God who saves the world by foolishness and weakness, Capon writes, and the hilarity by which he gives us corn, wine, and oil—not to mention his wonderfully two-faced creatures such as butter, salt, tobacco, and pork fat—this is no world in which to land on one side of a paradox. Nibbling away on Light Theology & Heavy Cream is to encounter an author who has always been perfectly substantial and perfectly silly at the same time, but here propels himself faster and farther in both directions.

You challenge me to match the sum total of the world’s miseries with a fast, but then you complain that I fall short because I have eaten lobster instead of beetles or something. Why, I could starve myself stone cold to death and still fall short. To use your very own argument, the world’s miseries are tractable only to God’s grace, not my merits. A lobster, obediently ingested, can remind me of that as well as anything else, eaten or not eaten, on the same principle.
—from the first chapter