Introduction

Friesen is a leading scholar of Religious Studies with particular areas of expertise in the fields of New Testament and Ancient Mediterranean Religions. Friesen's research develops interdisciplinary social-historical approaches to early Christianity that complicate traditional narratives beholden to uncritical interpretations of canonical texts. Metacriticism of Biblical and Religious Studies constitutes another noteworthy component of Friesen's scholarship. In several other studies, Friesen has argued that late-twentieth-century scholarship on Christian origins has tended to emphasize status over class, individuals over collectives, mobility over inequality, wealth over poverty, and so on, because of the unstated capitalist assumptions and class interests of modern scholars. In light of the contemporary world's ongoing and overlapping crises around ecological devastation, pandemic death and suffering, and the ongoing war in Ukraine, Ibita considers the formation of trauma relating to food insecurity as a means of analyzing the traumas played out at the Lord's supper in Corinth.