The word has an antiquated feel to it. We picture a Dickensian character, his vest barely able to cover his belly, sitting in front of a large platter scattered with the detritus of dining. Perhaps it is the over-the-top nature of the word itself that makes us sure that gluttony is the one deadly sin that never applies to us.

But gluttony, say scholars and theologians, is as modern as McDonald's — and Game Box and overdraft protection.

It's all about excess.

The trick is figuring out at what point we cross the line — from being a person who has simply reached for another glazed doughnut, from being a nation that invented the SUV, from being a global economy that prods its citizens to always buy more. Where have we crossed the line to become a people who individually and collectively are guilty of something that can be categorized as a sin?

In the beginning, gluttony was strictly about food and drink. And, in fact, technically it still is, says Mary Louise Bringle, a professor of philosophy and religion at Brevard College in North Carolina and author of "The God of Thinness: Gluttony and Other Weighty Matters."

The etymology of the word, she notes, refers to "that which you take down your gullet." Gluttony, she adds, was never about the palate. "It's not about enjoying the food. It's about using it as an anesthetic." Gluttony dulls the senses; that's why the first few bites of ice cream taste good, and the half-gallon ingested in one sitting "doesn't taste at all," Bringle says.

And yet the Catholic Encyclopedia, published in 1909, did argue that "it is incontrovertible that to eat or drink for the mere pleasure of the experience, and for that exclusively, is likewise to commit the sin of gluttony." That interpretation has changed over time, says Susan Northway, director of the office of religious education in the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City. Today, she says, Catholics view gluttony as the opposite of temperance, not asceticism.

Gluttony is now seen by society at large as a bad health choice — or sometimes, if we're more forgiving, as a matter of metabolism or an "issue"; at worst, like most of the seven deadly sins, it's seen as a character flaw. Ours is an age when the Food Pyramid and Freud have taken the place of Dante's Circles of Hell as the reference point for gluttony. We're more comfortable seeing overeating as an addiction, over-imbibing as a disease, excessive shopping as a weakness or just a credit-rating problem. In America, if we think of gluttony as a sin, it's often with a touch of irony; consider the dessert called Chocolate Decadence or, for that matter, that old standby Devil's Food Cake.