Monthly Archive for September, 2008

The issues of social change are, in my mind at least, not sim­ple or straight­for­ward.  Many of the church’s cur­rent authors like Brian McLaren referred to in the below post approach our prob­lems in a largely func­tional man­ner.  Writ­ers (and read­ers) look for prac­ti­cal ways to ‘apply’ the Gospel to our con­text. Most of us though with even a pass­ing inter­est know what we should be doing to help our sit­u­a­tion. We should buy fair trade prod­ucts, sup­port local economies and agri­cul­ture, plant a gar­den, com­post, bike, buy twirlly bulbs, etc. And so many of these books don’t really offer any­thing of sub­stance to the prob­lems fac­ing us as the church.

Hav­ing recently fin­ished read­ing a num­ber of books by William T. Cavanaugh I am con­vinced that the­ol­ogy has so much more to offer the church and the world around her. Cavanaugh, while in no way neglect­ing what we would be doing, takes the the­o­log­i­cal and eco­nomic real­i­ties of being and of desire seri­ously. In the brief 100 pages of Being Con­sumed Cavanaugh addresses the issue of eco­nom­ics and Chris­t­ian desire in four related areas.

He begins first with exam­in­ing our cur­rent eco­nomic mar­ket sys­tem, the so-called free mar­ket. Cavanaugh is not con­cerned with whether this sys­tem is good or bad in itself he lim­its him­self to ask­ing the ques­tion: When is a mar­ket free? The mar­ket is clas­si­cally under­stood as free when employ­ers, employ­ees and con­sumers are not coerced in their choices. The sys­tem is reg­u­lated inher­ently by the demands of the con­sumer. The mar­ket is then con­sid­ered free when indi­vid­u­als can pur­sue what they want with­out coer­cion within that sys­tem. Cavanaugh states that this view defines free­dom neg­a­tively and car­ries no vision of its own telos (goal, end, pur­pose). In the absence of these things Cavanaugh com­pares the ‘free’ rela­tion­ship between con­sumer and cor­po­ra­tion to a poker game where you are free to play but your oppo­nent has already seen your hand and knows your com­pul­sion to play. So while the mar­ket is indeed based on our wants and desires and though that can pro­vide some reg­u­la­tions Cavanaugh does not assume that our wants are really what we want. Lean­ing on the work of St. Augus­tine Cavanaugh intro­duces a pos­i­tive notion of free­dom which is not free­dom to do any­thing but the free­dom from every­thing towards God. In fact the cur­rent mar­ket promises of lim­it­less free­doms turn out in fact to be an illu­sion and in the end unfree­dom, restrict­ing envi­ron­men­tal health, fair wages, local diver­sity, etc. A mar­ket is free then to the extent that dig­ni­fied rela­tion­ships are nur­tured with each other, with the land and its resources and ulti­mately with God which is the telos of human existence.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘Who Changes What? — Find­ing Our Way to Communion’

Hi every­one.  I want to thank Tim here at Cana­dian Men­non­ite for giv­ing me a chance to write in this con­text.  As Tim men­tioned blog­ging is a chance to write and reflect on issues in a more imme­di­ate and inter­ac­tive way.  My own blog has been up and run­ning for over six years now (in dif­fer­ent forms).  My inter­ests tend to range from the­ol­ogy, cul­ture and lit­er­a­ture and how those things impact our lives.  This past week­end I was at a con­fer­ence in which Brian McLaren and oth­ers spoke on social and envi­ron­men­tal issues.  It has been a pretty busy week­end and so my first real post next week will prob­a­bly on that experience.

I hope you visit often (per­haps you will even be brave enough to dis­cover what that lit­tle “Entries RSS” link to the right is!) and feel free to click on the lit­tle com­ment but­ton below the title and have your own say.

David Driedger