Strata: The Bible in the News: Our Daily Bread

“Give us this day our daily bread,” as found in Matthew 6:11, is one of the petitions found in what we generally call the Lord’s Prayer. Positioned midway between the beginning and the end of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, this is serious business— Biblically speaking. As it turns out, correspondents for the popular press worldwide also take the expression “daily bread” pretty seriously.

This is, so it seems, at least partially the result of establishments such as Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank, which distributes food and often other services to the needy within their communities. This is important, even crucial, work, not lending itself to levity or leitmotifs. Nonetheless, there are some occurrences of “daily bread” in the daily (or weekly) press that might lead us to reflect on Biblical connections—and that, after all, is what this column is all about!

First, we observe that the “cult of celebrity” extends to charitable organizations as it does to just about every other facet of modern life. We begin, as we often do, with sports. Our Daily Bread, a food bank in Maryland, attracted sports-related support from “the Chesapeake Bayhawks of Major League Lacrosse” and the junior varsity football players from Meade High School (Annapolis’ Capital and the Maryland Gazette, respectively).