Teologia “boa para comer”: comensalidade, hábitos alimentares e sustentabilidade no horizonte da teologia da libertação contemporânea

Abstract

Eating is the human activity which most intimately connects nature with culture. It passes through all aspects of life constituting palatable meanings and being constituted as symbolic systems which permeate human relations. Based on this motto the goal of the reflection is delineated within the elaboration from a theological perspective of liberation circumscribed by eating as a field of contemporary study of reality, presupposing that food tastes are constructed historically, socially and culturally; in this way the conquest and liberation are revealed through the stomach, that is, through the culture of eating habits. For this, the methodology of conceptual bibliographic character approaches the method for these goals, of the hermeneutical circle of Liberation Theology and advocates, as an analytical mediation, a distinct socio-anthropology of eating; from this one extracts methodological-practical and theological analyses with regard to research on eating habits. Such a theoretical-reflexive endeavor obtains as results empirical data about eating habits and above all, socio-anthropological analyses which nourish theological re-significations and re-readings of the Gospel message, with a special accent on the trajectory of Jesus, girdled as a fruit of the appropriation and translation to the faith community which was contemporaneous with the commensality of Jesus. One observes that the tradition of commensality and table communion have gained, in contemporary societies, characteristics ever more distant from the reciprocity and giving ties, reformulating the indispensable conviviality of eating (with) in favor of adapting food consumption with the work rhythms, with urban life and with the hedonist satisfaction of consumption. The intent is, in this way, to conclude that the commensality of Jesus offers the faith community a reinvigorating update of the praxis aimed at the solidarity and communion with the oppressed, now understood within a more plural perspective of Latin American theology, consequently, a discipleship which is dethroned from the pretensions of implanting the Kingdom of God through the faith community, but is decidedly dedicated to a diakonia incarnated in the human reality through the transforming service of table communion. All of this is agglutinated within a materialist theological reflection which one can comprehend as being “good to eat”.