A range of contemporary theological reflection on consumer culture in the United States shares a conviction that the central task of theology is to respond, resist, or reshape consumer culture. And in many of these narratives, the location par excellence of that response is the Eucharist. Christian hope, they argue, is found in our effective cultivation of practices of everyday resistance to the market. This book argues that reducing the work of theology to resistance and centering Christian hope in a Eucharist that might better support that resistance undermines our ability to talk about the ... More

A range of contemporary theological reflection on consumer culture in the United States shares a conviction that the central task of theology is to respond, resist, or reshape consumer culture. And in many of these narratives, the location par excellence of that response is the Eucharist. Christian hope, they argue, is found in our effective cultivation of practices of everyday resistance to the market. This book argues that reducing the work of theology to resistance and centering Christian hope in a Eucharist that might better support that resistance undermines our ability to talk about the activity of God within a consumer culture, binds grace to human activity, and instrumentalizes the Eucharist into ethics. By reframing the question in terms of God’s activity in, and in spite of, consumer culture, it proposes a mode of theological reflection on consumer culture and Eucharist that sees their interrelationship in light of the unique challenges that American consumerism poses to Christian thought and practice. With an angle of vision shaped by Michel de Certeau’s insight into the tactics of everyday life and Walter Benjamin’s way of seeing “theological” wishes and desires invested in fallen commodities, it offers a lived theological account of consumer culture that recognizes not only its deceptions but also traces of truth in its broken promises and fallen hopes. And it proposes a vision of the Eucharist that takes seriously its this-worldly materiality even as it makes promises this world cannot keep.