Join us on Wednesday, April 2, at 4:30 p.m. CDT for a lecture by the Very Rev. Dr. Andrew McGowan entitled "True Bread: Missionaries, Luminaries, and the Magisterium on Wheat, Leavening, Gluten, and the Eucharist.
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The Roman Catholic Church insists on the presence of gluten in eucharistic bread, despite the impact of celiac disease on some communicants, asserting this is essential to the character of bread. Yet this focus on a substance (gluten) only discovered in the West in the 18
th century invites some further reflection. The origins of the modern Roman canonical requirement will be shown to lie less in ancient tradition than in the Enlightenment and colonialism, but raise important questions nevertheless about how wheat, fermentation, gluten, and other factors contribute to what constitutes bread, and hence the Eucharist itself.
The Very Rev’d Dr. Andrew McGowan has been Dean of Berkeley Divinity School since 2014. He is an Anglican priest and historian. His scholarship focuses on early Christian communities and contemporary Anglicanism. Before coming to Yale, McGowan was Warden of Trinity College at the University of Melbourne. He was also a member of the General Synod of the Australian Anglican Church and a member of its Doctrine Commission. As such, he contributed to published conversations on environmental theology, restorative justice, and the theology of worship. He was also editor of the Journal of Anglican Studies for ten years.
Dean McGowan is the author of
Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (Oxford, 1999), Ancient Christian Worship (Baker Academic, 2014; Italian translation
Il Culto Cristiano dei Primi Secoli [Dehoniane, 2019]),
Ancient and Modern (Wipf and Stock, 2015), and
Seven Last Words: Cross and Creation (Cascade, 2021).
Join us in the Lloyd Forum of Hamilton Hall or register for the livestream below.
Registration is no longer available because the registration deadline has passed.