ABSTRACT
The rejection of alcohol can serve as an illustration. It has certainly been an ascetical act at many times in history, yet growing up in a Protestant home in Oklahoma in the 1940s and 1950s, I did not perceive the rejection of alcohol as ascetical. It was less a matter of personal choice than an acceptance of the dominant mores of that world. It was the use of alcohol, if anything, that set a person apart from the ordinary run of people in that world, yet such use would not qualify as ascetical because it was not perceived as a “more or less demanding bodily praxis.” It seems to me that three qualities are requisite to make something ascetical: a relatively demanding bodily praxis, voluntarily undertaken, that sets those who adopt it apart from and, in the view of some, above the ordinary run of people in their world.
