Posts in: Books

Finished reading: Being Consumed by William T. Cavanaugh 📚

So straight-forward and insightful. I figured before reading Cavanaugh’s new one I would read this little guy (100 pages), sitting on the shelf for who-knows-how-long. If I were a teacher and had students reading Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, I would have them follow it up with this one for two reasons:

  1. While I thoroughly endorse Zuboff’s book, I was disappointed by the scarcity of light, which Cavanaugh does not lack and which he points more convincingly and specifically toward.

  2. While Zuboff’s is something of a tour de force, the gist of her argument is old — we have known and been collectively inexcusable for way too much and for way too long. Cavanaugh’s contains, in far fewer pages and in much simpler terms, the essential diagnosis — and it was written a decade earlier.

As Zuboff is at pains to communicate, the “free market” — to say nothing about the surveilled, manipulated and manipulating one — relies on our ignorance. (And we should add, it relies on a large amount of acedia.) Cavanaugh is at pains to say that we are usually asking the wrong question, and by doing so we also avoid the correct answers. The question is not “Is the market free?” but when and to what end?

“The crucial question is: When is a market free? In other words, how can we judge when any particular transaction is free? I reject the idea that a transaction is free just because it is not subject to state intervention or any other form of external coercion. We must give a fuller, more positive, account of freedom.”

Ultimately, in the economy that we face every single day, we have a choice about how we will relate to the world, to the things and the people in it, both the ones we see and the ones that we do not see. “Things do not have personalities of there own,” Cavanaugh writes, “but they are embedded in relationships of production and distribution that bring us into contact, for better or worse, with other people’s lives.”

In a very important sense, then — and especially for those of us who believe that every single person is made in the image of God, that all bring not only to “the market” but to the table of life, the communio personarum, their own inviolable experience with God — it does not matter if that contact is made in person or made through the disguise of “the market.” Whether it is a cashier across the checkout counter or a mango lady in Haiti, in each case, we participate in a human communion that requires more of us than an empty, rationalizing slogan called “free.”

Finished reading: The Best of It by Kay Ryan 📚

I’ve been reading this without an ounce of haste for two years. Not once did I feel the need to hurry up and finish it.

Finished reading: Silence by Shusaku Endo 📚

Not a book that is easy to write about, which is why I’m looking forward to the Transcontinental Virtual Book Club chat with our friends in southern Oregon. It was timely, though, with reading Walter Brueggemann and trying (and mostly failing) to get into the Hulu show Shōgun. I think I’ll go rewatch Martin Scorsese’s adaptation now.

Here’s Scorsese in his foreword to the book:

It seems to me that Silence, [Shūsaku Endō’s] greatest novel and one that has become increasingly precious to me as the years have gone by, is precisely about the particular and the general. And it is finally about the first overwhelming the second.

…He understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience. The voice that always urges the faithful—the questioning faithful—to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture. Christianity is based on faith, but if you study its history you see that it’s had to adapt itself over and over again, always with great difficulty, in order that faith might flourish. That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical. Yet I believe they go hand in hand. One nourishes the other. Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it exists with faith—truth faith, abiding faith—it can end in the most joyful sense of communion. It’s this painful, paradoxical passage—from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion—that Endō understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.

📚Happy New Book in the Mail Day! Celebrate accordingly

Finished reading: Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination by Conrad L. Kanagy 📚

Not quite what I expected. I really enjoyed listening to the author talk about his book and about his admiration for Walter Brueggemann. And the book is peppered with good insights, both from Brueggemann and from Kanagy. But I don’t think it lived up to the genre of “theological biography.” Brueggemann’s fascinating family history in the Prussian Union and the German Pietist tradition, and especially his lifelong regard for his father’s ever-struggling but ever-genuine life as a pastor — these are mentioned repetitively throughout the book but I thought given little depth or storyline, and no real (narrative or theological) progression to follow. Neither is much insight given into Brueggemann’s actual theological writings.

Still, Kanagy presents a short, affectionate look at a prolific theologian who has shown great courage amid “ambivalence and ambiguity” — even, if not especially, amid his own. As Kanagy puts it, through his life Brueggemann has shown

the courage to tell the empire to be merciful, to show the empire its injustice, to remind the empire of its short-lived power, and to remind the empire that in front of it, [visible through the “prophetic imagination,"] lies an alternative reality that doesn’t have the empire’s name on it.

If you like, here’s a short clip where you can hear that straight from the horse’s mouth.

Currently Reading: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman 📚

The Hmong have a phrase, hais cuaj txub kaum txub, which means “to speak of all kinds of things.” It is often used at the beginning of an oral narrative as a way of reminding the listeners that the world is full of things that may not seem connected but actually are; that no event occurs in isolation; that you can miss a lot by sticking to the point; and that the storyteller is likely to be rather long-winded.… If a Hmong tells a fable, for example, about Why Animals Cannot Talk or Why Doodle Bugs Roll Balls of Dung, he is likely to begin with the beginning of the world.

Started and stopped reading: All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld 📚

Doubt I’ll pick it back up. I enjoyed the Commonweal interview with Rothfeld — at least I think I did; I’m only ever half paying attention to podcasts.

I think very often of a quote from one of CS Lewis’s essays, (wonderfully read by Ralph Cosham here):

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority.…The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other, the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow, is a prosaic barbarian.

Add minimalist tendencies to equality I suppose that’s what I expected to find — a praise for excess over minimalism and equality. But if that’s what Rothfeld is doing, it’s absolutely nothing like Lewis. The first essay not only shows no sign of Lewis’s sentiment, but seems to lack any sense of satisfaction or reverence at all.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I found no indication that this would improve through the book. And I’m too slow a reader to find out