So I’ve been MIA…Those of you who read this frequently know that that means that I’m either (a) sick (b) gone (c) in the middle of a big hairy theology class or (d) all of the above. Well, the answer in this case is c. I’m working on an independent study on theology and consumerism. It is amazing, but leaves no time for blogging or anything else really.
So I’ll share some of it with you…
This is from the latest edition of John Kavanaugh’s Following Christ in a Consumer Society- highly recommended. This man is intense about prayer. No wonder it is so hard for me to find space and time for prayer and solitude–it goes against the grain of our culture.
Silent solitude is filled with risk. It lacks pragmatics. It is hopelessly unmarketable. The centering of prayer is an exercise of honesty, in getting in touch with our needfulness and poverty so shrilly denied by commercialism and materialism. …Prayer is an assalt upon the fradulence of mere roles, of social and cultural pretense, of the idols we cling to and are enslaved by. As such it carries with it all of the existential terror of any act of intimacy with another person. Afraid of being “found out” we avoid intimacy…Yet we long for personal communion . Somehow we long to be found out, to be seen as we are–to be accepted as we are. This is what takes place in the intimacy of prayer. We discover that God who is revealed to us in Jesus Christ has “found us out” already and not rejected us. …the declaration of our poverty, of our dependant needfulness of our incapacity to save ourselves through idolatry, of our ontological incompleteness, is not a shameful discovery, but a discovery of our being loved for what we actually are… Thus, prayer is not only a countercultural act. It is a reappropriation of our personhood and identity. It is a dealienation, a decommodification of our very lives. 153-154
Tags: Christianity, consumerism, consumption, prayer
May 16, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Now, he can’t be related to William Cavanaugh, author of (most recently) Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire, can he? Good stuff from K; I’m about to get into C’s Theopolitical Imagination.
May 16, 2008 at 2:05 pm
No relation besides both being catholic c/k avanaughs who are brilliant social ethicists, theologians, and professors at small, catholic liberal arts schools. I bet they know each other. C is a lay theologian and K is a priest. I’m reading Being Consumed right now also. I think it is amazing so far.
-t
May 16, 2008 at 4:15 pm
This is not quite on point to this talk back, since strictly speaking it’s about prayer, but I thought I might add that Bill Cavanaugh is, in my estimation, the most profound theological ethicist living right now. I love this from Being Consumed: “In order to judge whether or not an exchange is free, one must know whether or not the will is moved toward a good end. This requires some kind of substantive–not merely formal–acount of the true end, or telos of the human person. Where there are no objectively desirable ends, and the individual is told to choose his or her ends, then choice itself becomes the only thing that is inherently good….And yet, Augustine says, desire for objects that are cut free from their source and their end in God is ultimately the desire for nothing…A person buys something–anything–trying to fill the hole that is the empty shrine. And once the shopper purchases the thing, it turns into a nothing, and she has to head back to the mall to continue the search. With no objective ends to guide the search, her search is literally endless” (pp. 13-15).
The elaboration of this account of positive freedom oriented by proper ends leads Cavanaugh to compare the maquiladora industries in Mexico and L.A., where laborers can be hired for 30-33 cents/hr., and workers for the Mondragon corporation, based in the Basque country, which was founded by Catholic priest Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta on the principles of distributism. Although the laborers for both corporations would technically be considered free according to free market economists (i.e. when freedom is defined as the absence of external coercion), when a positive account of freedom is introduced, “it becomes obvious that the Salvadoran woman is little better than enslaved and that the Mondragon worker is afforded the opportunity for true freedom” (pp. 27-28).
This account of positive and negative freedom is an important part of Cavanaugh’s overall thesis (which it seems he learned while studying under Stanley Hauerwas at Duke) that Christians must narrate acts, persons, and institutions differently than the world–and that this is precisely the Christian “political” contribution. It is not that the existence of the Mondragon corporation or fair trade coffee cannot be incorporated within the “grand narrative” of capitalism, for it surely can, but that Christians who participate in these enterprises will narrate them according to Christian grammar, which changes the terms of the debate and is ultimately subversive to unjust practices. This is because it ultimately conduces to greater human flourishing to narrate the existence of fair trade coffee or the Mondragon Corporation not as a “niche market” for do-gooders under the umbrella of tenctacular, all-pervasive capitalism, but as the inbreaking of the kingdom of God, which orients our patterns of consumption toward our ultimate beatitude–fellowship with God in the company of others.
May 16, 2008 at 4:18 pm
I also have to say that I get a tiny twinge of nationalistic pride when I think that Arizmendiarrieta and I have a common ancestry. Los bascos se venceran! Wish I could speak Basque.