consumerism

July 30, 2014

Consumerism, Service, and Religion

Today at The Imaginative Conservative, Fr. Dwight Longenecker, in an excerpt from his recent book, bemoans what he sees as “The Spoiling of America.” While sympathetic to his support for self-discipline, I find his analysis of our consumer culture to be myopic. Continue Reading...

July 22, 2014

For the Good of Mankind, Side With the Consumer

Should we always take the side of the individual consumer? That’s the question Rod Dreher asks in a recent post on “Amazon and the Cost of Consumerism.” It’s a good question, one that people have been asking for centuries. Continue Reading...

June 17, 2014

A Cultural Case for Capitalism: Part 4 of 12 — The Crunchy Con Critique

[Part 1 is here.] The free economy frees entrepreneurs to create new wealth for themselves and others, which brings us to the issue of consumption. In his book Crunchy Cons, conservative author Rod Dreher describes consumerism this way: “Consumerism fetishizes individual choice, and sees its expansion as unambiguous progress. Continue Reading...

June 13, 2014

A Cultural Case for Capitalism: Part 1 of 12

The West has made some remarkable steps forward culturally in the past several generations, as, for instance, in the areas of civil rights (the unborn being a notable exception), race relations, and cooperation among Christians of different traditions. Continue Reading...

December 31, 2013

Cooperation Makes Markets Thrive

In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, Emory economics professor Paul H. Rubin makes an interesting argument about the way economists tend to over-elevate and/or misconstrue the role of competition in the flourishing of markets. Continue Reading...

November 26, 2013

Calvin Coolidge and a Thanksgiving of Abundance

My pastor made a good point in his sermon Sunday that the more secular we become as a nation the less we talk about “abundance.” Instead, the national dialogue of our politics shift to discussions about scarcity. Continue Reading...

November 20, 2013

Q&A: Brett McCracken on Consuming Culture Well

In his 2010 book, Hipster Christianity, Brett McCracken explored the dynamics of a particular cultural movement in (and against) modern evangelicalism. In his new book, Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty, he pulls the lens back, focusing on how the church more broadly ought to approach culture, particularly when it comes to consuming it. Continue Reading...

October 07, 2013

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