Blog Template Theology of the Body: My chicken dinner theory

Saturday, November 10, 2007

My chicken dinner theory

I have a different chicken dinner theory: fried chicken is good! Since this blog is about proclaiming the Gospel, I want to offer my praise to the art form that is served so frequently in many churches that it is nicknamed the 'gospel bird'. Let's face it, crunchy on the outside, steaming moist on the inside, salty, greasy... is there really anything better?

So if you had an Anglican bishop in town and wanted to convince him of your point of view, where would you take him (or her, of course)? My vote would be for Bubba's, which several years ago was voted by Southern Living as the number two chicken joint in America. They soak their chicken in brine the night before and it always comes out of the fryer just perfect. Yum, yum, yum.

If you are looking for other ideas about where to get some gospel bird, there was a nice discussion of it on the Dallas Morning News food blog just recently. Definitely worth trying a few of those places.

And the NY Times just ran a nice piece on two chicken joints in New Orleans and how they are recovering post-Katrina. It makes me want to hop in a car and drive down there right now.

I'm always happy to talk about my second favorite food in the world, so thanks to Father Nelson for giving me an opening!

[By the way, I'm completely sympathetic to his point of view, so please don't view this post as a glib rejection of his point -- I just wanted to write about fried chicken. A couple of years ago, I wrote a long paper about the racism and colonialism that continue to haunt the Anglican left. Implying that Third-World bishops can be easily bought off is to engage in a very subtle, yet viciously toxic, form of racism that suggests that these bishops are not sufficiently smart enough or morally developed enough to have their own principles and stand by them. Making allies with people that agree with them does not indicate that they are morally corrupt, but rather that they think what is at stake is worth marshalling all available resources in pursuit of their goals. From an outsider's perspective (I'm not Anglican), what is hilarious to me is to watch how the Anglican left engages in these subtle forms of racism by implying that black people are easily bought off. I think what makes a lot of people uncomfortable is that the colonized are now becoming the colonizers -- and it's not so comfortable when the shoe is on the other foot.]