Consumerism
God’s design for our lives includes stewardship of everything we have received. Most followers of Jesus give of their finances and volunteer their time, but stewardship also means responsible living with our cars, homes, energy consumption, water use, and so on. In these areas God provides an opportunity for wisdom and discernment on our part. At the very beginning of scripture, in Genesis 1, God outlines a partnership that is wider and greener than many of us realize. It is inconsistent if we slap our 10 percent into the collection plate and then head home in a gas-guzzling car and flip on all the lights
Halloween is over. I was standing in the kitchen tonight pilfering through the bowl of chewy, crinkly wrapped treats that my children acquired last night. Poor things. They do all the work of running up and down the sidewalks, climbing stairs, ringing bells and then I dole them out a piece or two a day and confiscate anything with caramel for myself. Hardly seems fair.
“No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater than central air.” — The demon Azrael in Kevin Smith’s film Dogma
’Tis the gift to be simple,
’tis the gift to be free,
’Tis the gift to come down
where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves
With the nation facing fiscal uncertainty (actually, complete and absolute certainty—just like the inevitable wedgie I got every day in junior-high gym class), maybe it&rsq
Nadezhda Bolotina / Shutterstock
“This is my body, broken for you,” Jesus says to us in the central mystery of our faith. “Take and eat.” Eating is an inherently good activity, a channel of God’s goodness.
But in recent decades, this well has been poisoned for huge numbers of people. Anorexia, rare until the 1970s, today affects an estimated 1.5 million people in the United States. Perhaps twice that number have or are recovering from bulimia, a cycle of binge eating and purging (through vomiting or laxatives); millions more have binge eating alone. Up to one in five people with anorexia die from it—the highest death rate of any psychiatric illness. Eating disorders devastate the body, eroding teeth and bones, and stopping kidneys and hearts.
Christians certainly are not immune from eating disorders (they were “everywhere” at evangelical Wheaton College, one alum in recovery reports). But when was the last time you heard eating disorders mentioned in church? The body of Christ has a vocation to speak truth about the deadly idols of this present age, but instead we’ve kept a deafening silence.
Worse, underneath that silence are rubrics that reinforce rather than unravel the problems. You’re damned if you diet (vanity!) and damned if you don’t (gluttony!). Desire (for food or anything else) is blamed on the body, and both are lumped together as potential causes of sin. Old-fashioned sexism or newer libertarianism both give a pass to the hypersexualization and commodification of women.