Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver (review)

During the founding of our discipline, sociologists (the new secular priests) posed the question of what place religion has in modern society as they struggled to understand modernity and to stake their claim for a new kind of authority based not on wealth, birth or calling, but rather on expertise. The premise of this book is a very smart restatement of the religion-and-society question in a form sensible for our time and place. How does religion pervade people's everyday lives as they conduct them in a religiously pluralist society through settings that are not themselves primarily religious? The author investigates the religious talk and practice of people who volunteer for God's Love We Deliver (GLWD), a nonreligious (despite the name) nonprofit on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that prepares and delivers meals for those suffering from AIDs.

The obvious objection to such an endeavor is "If you want to find religion, why look someplace you may not find it?" The author's answer is that this is exactly where to look if you want to understand how and when people enact and experience their lives in society. This is a good answer, and yet in fact, she does not find much religion expressed or enacted at GLWD, leaving her with a classic "writing problem." How do you write about absence?

The author finds that talk about religion at GLWD is limited to going to church, preparing for holidays and engaging in parody or satire of groups such as conservative Christians or the Pope, who could be seen as either extreme or as antithetical to the "true spirit" of religion as understood by this liberal set of volunteers. She finds more religious practice than talk. For those to whom care-taking is a religious imperative, then cooking for the dying is a religious practice whether it takes place in a church basement or a secular voluntary organization, whether you pray first or just jump in and start dicing the carrots.

This book highlights absences, limits and boundaries, not a mean feat in ethnographic writing. What is missing is a larger frame that makes the absences understandable and shows why they are important. As I read this book, I wanted either an explanation for the why and how of the absence, a focus on how the experience of negotiating a pluralistic and nonreligious setting affected the volunteers' own religious identity and experience, or a meditation on what this tells us about the public or private nature of religion in our society. The author does a little of all three, and it leads to a book that, while smart and well-written, is also in some ways frustrating.

For example, one of the strongest parts of the book is the material included from the in-depth interviews with volunteers. From these, we learn about the religious motives that shape volunteering, the religious discourses that give it meaning, how the volunteers themselves see the kitchen's practices as religious or not, and how they feel about negotiating a secular setting while doing work that is for them religious. These interviews provide some of the most interesting material in the book, yet they are not integrated into the larger discussion of the challenges of religious pluralism in a public space or the effects of everyday religious practice on religious identity and commitment. Likewise, why the limits on religious talk and practice exist in this setting and what that says about pluralism is not analyzed in depth. The author notes that religion is particularly awkward here because of the link between AIDS and homosexuality and because many religious groups have a history of condemnation of homosexuality. In such a setting, religious people and religious talk may be perceived by others as particularly problematic. But the more general discussion of the possibilities for religious expression in pluralistic public settings is thin, and insights like this one, springing from the...