consumption
MULTICULTURAL CHURCHES can still be white spaces. Communities can be inherently individualistic. And acts of “justice” can alienate the very people Christ calls us to serve.
In Becoming a Just Church: Cultivating Communities of God’s Shalom , Adam L. Gustine points out paradoxes that have dominated the church for centuries. His book casts a prophetic vision of what justice can look like when it is fully embodied in the church.
“I am a liability in the work of justice,” he admits in the opening lines, indicating his white male identity. Aware of his privilege even as he reckons with matters of power and oppression, Gustine offers an unapologetic wake-up call to white evangelicals who have ignored the biblical call to justice and those who already consider themselves “woke.”
“A significant part of our history in evangelicalism could be characterized by either full-frontal assault on society or distancing ourselves in a protectionist way,” he writes. Evangelicals reduce justice to something either done tangentially (for example, donations) or in a manner that echoes colonialism (such as mission trips to foreign countries, depriving local construction workers of their livelihoods).
Volodymyr Baleha / Shutterstock.com
One of the dominant dogmas of the season seems to be both loud and clear: Our value as human beings is often dictated by our capacity to contribute toward economic growth.
This is what happens when Decemberism crucifies Christmas.
One may define “Decemberism” as a state in which the value of human life is determined exclusively by our personal rates of production and consumption. We notice this condition most often, of course, in December. Decemberism is the predominant religious tradition of the so-called “holiday shopping season,” and the significance of Christmas is consistently crucified as a result. As Victor Lebow states:
“Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption … we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”
In striking contrast to the Christmas ramifications of God’s incarnation, to be a human of any value in our current context is closely connected with supply and demand, even if it all leads to our personal and public self-destruction.
Simple living concept, Aleutie / Shutterstock.com
Jesus calls us to consume less and to live simply. To “live simply” in itself varies by person, situation, income, and values. While I still fantasize about becoming a new-age Laura Ingles Wilder, building a log cabin and weaving my own clothes, I have accepted that I need to interact with a consumer culture. Consuming is not a bad thing and is a necessary part of life. However, consuming becomes unhealthy when we find identity in our “stuff,” live beyond our means, or hurt others with our purchasing power.
I learned about alternative giving from a flier in my college dorm bathroom. Ithaca College and the surrounding town are notorious for progressive politics, activists, and a thriving farmers market on Cayuga Lake. Progressive politics were a part of the classroom, and I quickly learned about the often unhealthy connections between corporations, government, and the products we use. I remember feeling overwhelmed, powerless, and confused.
IF YOU’VE EVEN casually watched TV in the past five years, seen a movie with coming attractions, driven past billboards and fast food restaurants, or walked into a Barnes & Noble, you can’t avoid the onslaught of vampires in popular culture. As the summer draws to a close, so does the fourth season of HBO’s vampire comedy-drama True Blood. This summer’s vampire big screen attractions—the movie remake of the 1960s vampire soap opera Dark Shadows and the movie adaptation of the young adult novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (it is, improbably, exactly what it sounds like)—have come and gone. The fourth season of CW network’s young adult vampire melodrama The Vampire Diaries begins in September. And the publicity blitz for the final Twilight movie, Breaking Dawn-Part 2, (coming to theaters in mid-November) is about to colonize fast-food merchandise, billboards, and magazine covers.
Ever since John Polidori wrote “The Vampyre” as part of a bet with his good friend Mary Shelley and since Bram Stoker gave us Dracula, the vampire has never exactly gone out of fashion. Vampires are often the horizon on which we project our fears and anxieties, and, like other supernatural fantasy creatures, they help us take stock of our own humanness. If, as Nina Auerbach has argued in her book Our Vampires, Ourselves, we can learn a lot about different epochs of Western culture by the kind of vampires that are in vogue, what do we make of this current crop of blood suckers? What might they teach us about our humanity and our theological response to the world we live in?
If you sink your teeth into these contemporary vampire mythologies, the first thing that is likely to strike you is how attractive these vampires are. In the three vampire mythologies most popular right now, the Twilight series (originally young adult novels, now also movies), The Vampire Diaries (also originally YA fiction from the early 1990s, revived as a TV show in 2009), and True Blood (HBO’s most-watched series, based on adult supernatural romance novels), it is often hard to imagine a good reason why one wouldn’t want to be a vampire oneself. They are super-fast, super-strong, super-sensory beings, who also happen to be astonishingly attractive. And let’s not forget how many amazing skills one could learn—much less all the books one could read, languages one could speak, art one could appreciate—if one lived forever.
The Norton commercial says explicitly what most advertisements only imply.
You are the things you own.
Your identity is the stuff you have.
Your worth is what you own.
Last Saturday, August 20, 2011, I got arrested. Having never been arrested before, it feels strange to write that. Like most Americans I associate getting arrested with committing egregiously unlawful acts that require punishment
On Monday the Dow Jones industrial average fell 634.76 points; the sixth-worst point decline for the Dow in the last 112 years and the worst drop since December 2008. Every stock in the Standard and Poor's 500 index declined.
It is easy to blame bipartisan bickering for the impasse that led to Standard and Poor's downgrading of the American debt, and in turn the vertiginous fall of the Dow. This bickering -- this substitution of ideology for reason, of egotism for compassion and responsibility on the part of lawmakers -- is a national disgrace; but while it failed to fix the problem, we must realize that it did not cause it. The cause -- and potential for a significant renewal -- lies much deeper.
So let's allow ourselves to ask a fundamental question: what's an economy for?
Since our fast began this past Monday, I've been re-reading one of the classic books on spirituality by my friend Richard Foster,
Yesterday I received my email copy of ePistle, Evangelicals for Social Action’s weekly electronic communication. This article discussing the situation in the Ivory Coast and the former president Laurent Gbagbo immediately caught my attention:
“The Ivory Coast is on the brink of civil war, and chocolate companies could play a critical role in saving lives and bringing peace.
Between July 30 and August 3, a reign of terror was released upon villages in the Congo's eastern mining districts.
