Weekly Newsletter from Christian Vegetarian Association CVA - October 19, 2026
From Christian Vegetarian Association (CVA)

  1. Overcoming Fear
  2. Letter Published in The Tablet 17-10-26
  3. Handbooks for Vegan Food Preparation

1. Overcoming Fear

As discussed previously, our fears can undermine our desire to be kind, compassionate, and just. How, then, can we overcome our fears?

People who have experienced severe trauma sometimes need professional assistance and specialized therapeutic interventions, such as cognitive behavioral therapy. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to avoid extreme trauma may nevertheless carry fears that arise from common human experiences: imperfect parenting during childhood, injuries, losses, and the loss of loved ones.

I offer a few suggestions. Individually, we can benefit from various meditative practices. Among their benefits, meditation can help us develop a more objective, third-person perspective on our concerns and on how our actions affect others. It can also help reduce our attachment to things we fear losing, such as career goals, material possessions, and personal relationships. Such mindsets can encourage a more curious, empathetic stance when confronted with situations that otherwise anger us.

Communally, many people find that communities of faith can support them when life seems overwhelming. Such communities can also provide uplifting opportunities to support others in need. My only caution is that some communities find their unity not through a shared commitment to truth, understanding, and service, but through opposition to people with different religious, political, or social-justice views. Such groups can provide a strong sense of community, belonging, and meaning, but they do little, if anything, to help bring about the Beloved Community or the Realm of God.

Because such communities are grounded in scapegoating, they are inherently unstable. They can readily turn against individual members who question the group's teachings or practices.

I welcome your thoughts on ways we can manage and overcome our fears.

Stephen R. Kaufman, M.D.

2. Letter Published in The Tablet 17-10-26

In all my long years of devotedly reading - and writing for - The Tablet, I have never been moved to write a personal letter until seeing Virginia Bell's letter on the suffering of chickens in the poultry industry (3 October).

Many things about our civilisation will seem hard to understand when humans of the future look back. One of them will be our utterly casual consumption of the flesh of animals produced in a brutal industrial food system.

Much of our treatment of animals in this system amounts to a kind of slow torture. For chickens, it means packed barns, broken limbs and gas chambers. That we treat any animal like this, not out of necessity, but simply because we have an appetite for its flesh, is an embarrassment to the name human.

Much of the Christian discussion about vegetarianism asks the question in the abstract - Should I eat meat? The resulting conversation is often short-circuited by the answer, "Well, Jesus ate meat, didn't he, so what's the problem?"

Jesus lived when industrial animal farming had not been invented. His practice of eating meat is morally incomparable to ours for this reason. Industrial animal farming is unique to modern civilisation: in its scale, its brutality, and its single-minded subservience to consumer appetite.

Approximately 76 billion animals are factory-farmed worldwide at any given time. Each of these lives is lived in a state of deprivation and defacement whose sole justification is our pleasure.

The Church has been on a painfully slow path to the acknowledgement of the dignity of non-human animals. But Laudato Si', at last, affirmed the Biblical vision of all creatures sharing a transcendent destiny in the new creation.

I hope that the Church's leaders will invite us to live in accordance with this magnificent truth. That will mean many things, but one of them is refusing to support an industry so grotesquely abusive of the dignity of God's creatures as most of what counts as modern industrial animal farming.

Carmony Grey
London

3. Handbooks for Vegan Food Preparation

"Terra Vegan by Nemo TV is a collection of forty handbooks on making your own plant-based food, starting from scratch. The first series, nine volumes, is for home cooks: plant-based alternatives to cured meats, cheeses and seafood, sauces, bread, desserts and fermented foods. The following series go deeper into koji and fermentation, patisserie and, for those who want to make it their work, production to legal standards. Behind it lies a clear idea: respect for every form of life and for the planet, starting with what we put on the table. The handbooks are available in English, as ebooks and in print.

https://terraveganbynemo.com/en/
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0GVHKLKLQ

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