Books
Beyond the Culture of Care: Helping those Souled-out by the Market Economy
Frances M. Moran, St Pauls, $19.95
Beyond the Culture of Care discusses a pastoral response to people suffering from “market mentality” — a condition where the victim has been “souled-out to the forces of the all pervasive marketplace in which everything has a dollar value, even human beings.”
Moran provides information on contemporary culture, image, human subjectivity, psychoanalysis, listening skills, the role of art and music and aged care.
The most interesting part of the book is the case studies of pastoral care in practice. Although, the case study of the teacher’s pastoral dialogue with a student alarmed me. It refers to the teacher introducing the topic of sex. This is not appropriate and the context of the conversation could also be misconstrued, to the teacher’s detriment, if overheard.
Aside from this, Beyond the Culture of Care would be a helpful book to people wanting to learn more about pastoral care.
Katy Gerner
back to resources
Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture
Vincent J. Miller, Continuum, $39.95
Well researched, clear thesis, logical argument, ordered presentation, good analysis, internally consistent and conclusions with integrity and a touch of reality. If I sound impressed it’s because I am.
Most arguments I have heard about the consumer culture have been a prophetic (in the biblical sense) analysis of a lack of ethics, greed and deceptive advertising leading to a shallow and fruitless life. Especially when compared to a “deeply spiritual and rewarding life” which usually means a life of simplistic, moralistic (and even legalistic) righteousness.
Rather than simple condemnation of the consumer mentality Miller analyses the complex relationship between the creators and receivers of culture, and the relationship between ethos (theology and intention) and praxis.
And he proposes some directions by which a faith perspective can further inform (be insinuated into) daily life within the given of consumerism.
The book is more a serious study than a pleasant read, but I appreciated Miller’s method of integrating tradition and experience, theology and praxis, to seek ways of expressing faith in the 21st century.
“As theologians from Thomas Aquinas to Gustavo Gutierrez have made clear, the encounter with God always takes place within the structures of human social and political existence. For this reason, the questions of oppression and agency we have been considering were already theologically significant.”
It is, I believe, a method which needs to be applied to every aspect of our church today.
Rob Dummermuth
back to resources
What was Lost
Catherine O’Flynn, Scribe, $24.95
In the Uniting Church we talk a lot about people on the fringes of society. But this novel gently shows how lonely these peripheries can be.
Its main setting is a large Birmingham shopping centre. This brings home how isolating and soulless such market places and consumerism often are — and this despite the mall’s iconic place in Western society as one of our most-frequented public spaces.
A disappearance from Green Oaks shopping centre is the event which links all the characters in this finely wrought first novel — which deservedly won, and was short-listed for, a slew of literary awards.
Twenty years after ten-year-old Kate Meaney disappears — with her “Top Secret” notebook and Mickey, her toy monkey — she is glimpsed on a CCTV screen by Green Oaks security guard Kurt.
Kate’s mum left when she was a toddler and her dad died of a stroke so she’s been living with her grandmother and roaming the streets detecting signs of criminal activity.
Kate was friends with Adrian, the son of the newsagent.
After her disappearance, Adrian is treated as a suspect; so he flees because of the damage the suspicion does to his reputation.
Adrian ’s absence distresses his sister Lisa, who now works in the mall’s cut-price record store and longs to see him again.
Lisa teams up with Kurt to try to unravel the Kate Meaney mystery and eventually we learn what cost there has been in hiding the truth.
Humour and sadness blend here with fine characterisation to offer unsettling views about how in a world of surveillance so few people truly pay attention (and those who do might be very scary). And how, in a world where buying stuff is a key leisure activity, people, connection and kindness, can so easily go missing.
Marjorie Lewis-Jones
back to resources
What Can One Person Do? Faith to Heal a Broken World
Sabina Alkire & Edmund Newell, Darton, Longman & Todd, $39.95
Not only do we know that all are created in God’s image and are loved by God; we’re also well aware that “good news for the poor” is at the very heart of Jesus’ gospel.
So did you know that five million children die each year of hunger? That one in six human beings lack clean water to drink? That one in three lack basic sanitation? And that nearly half of the world’s humanity lives on less than $2 a day?
This book does three things very well. It suggests a range of practical steps for people to take in order to be part of the solution to world poverty. It paints a picture of what the world community is aiming for: a world where every person is freed from the dehumanising effect of extreme poverty. And it frames it all within the mission of God.
What Can One Person Do does not simply outline the problems of poverty. Nor does it aim to place guilt on those of us who are wealthy by comparison.
Rather, the book uses the stories of real people to help us understand the grinding effects of poverty and provides simple suggestions for action.
There will be some suggestions that are beyond the average person; for instance, embarking on an immersion visit to a developing country. However, most are well within the capacity of most Australians.
As well as being useful for personal reflection, the book is well suited for use in group study and discussion and includes questions for reflection in each chapter.
Let yourself and your congregation be moved and inspired by this book and your capacity to make a difference.
Karyl Davison
back to resources
Stuffed & Starved: Markets, Power & the Hidden Battle for the World Food System
Raj Patel, Black Inc, $34.95
This book makes an important contribution to understanding that the politics of food is not a narrow matter of shopping, ethical or otherwise.
It involves the urgent study of globalisation and social justice, and the politics of modern capitalism itself.
Patel argues that the effect of turning food production over to the market has resulted in less competition.
Providing clear resonances for us in Australia, Patel opens the book with the epidemic of farmer suicides that have hit rural India, South Korea and the United States, depicting a grim picture of despair and debt.
Yet there is a growing movement to regain “food sovereignty” or the people’s right to define their own agriculture and food policies. Patel sees this as the hope for the future and ends his book with an impassioned call to action.
The “honey trap” of ethical consumerism will not do it, he says; we must organise and reclaim control of the food system, just as the landless in Brazil and cooperatives in America and Europe have done.
Stuffed & Starved is an invitation to think more deeply about what we eat and how it gets to our tables.
Karyl Davison
back to resources
Living Well While Doing Good
Donna Schaper, Seabury Books, $29.95
Living Well While Doing Good explores the ideas of not over committing oneself and leading a simpler but more effective life. Several chapters begin with the words, “Simplifying”, such as “Simplifying Money”, “Simplifying Control”, “Simplifying Domesticity”, “Simplifying Size.”
Schaper writes beautifully — her sentences are short and picturesque and full of wisdom and advice from the Bible, Christians she knows and Christians she has never met but has read about. She is particularly fond of trouble makers, because she says she finds them richly rewarding.
Schaper does not limit herself to Christian wisdom, but the wisdom she quotes from other philosophies and religions are concepts that Christians should have no trouble with.
She explains the principles of giving in the Jewish Law of Tzedekah, the importance of appreciating your home and making it spiritually beautiful in feng shui, Ghandi’s teachings on social justice, the Tai Chi approach to activism — to act without forcing — and the Japanese kazen, which is the importance of small things.
I loved Living Well While Doing Good. It was the most delightful, useful book I have read for years.
Katy Gerner
back to resources
Don’t Get Too Comfortable
David Rakoff, Scribe, $24.95
The back blurb is right for once: “Both as Wildean satire and as a plea for a little human decency, Don’t Get Too Comfortable reveals the extremes to which a devotion to consumer culture can lead.”
This collection of smart and sardonic magazine essays examines how comfortable Americans are enticed to part with their hard-earned.
Rakoff reflects on narcissism, cryonics, making stuff, morning television, fasting, gay politics, bizarre Australian theatre, alternative diets, and the “prototypical baby-boomer trick of pathologising those things that stand in the way of one and one’s desires, however unrealistic or selfish”.
He tells how the Concorde was more a triumph of consumption than of science: a beautifully controlled yet hideously wasteful bonfire.
Creature comfort, Rakoff says, is not some bourgeois capitalist construct, but framing it as a moral virtue is. Even appreciating the brand of gluttony that poses of asceticism requires having endured decades of plenty. “In order to maintain a life free of clutter and suitable for a sacred space, you’ll need another room to hide your shit.”
How many of us guiltily indulge ourselves, shedding the “tears of the Walrus, bemoaning the wholesale carnage of his little oyster friends as he scoops another bivalve into his voracious, sucking maw”?
How much longer, asks Rakoff, can we balance the hours spent crying in front of the news with the obliviating powers of alcohol? How much longer will we keep the lights burning simply because we can?
Stephen Webb
back to resources
