Being Consumed: Book Review

Being Consumed helps Christians to understanding and criticising the globalised consumer economic situation of the present. It show cases how humanities economic structures of our present day are inadequate and faulty, and we as Christians need to question these systems and re-line ourselves to The Scripture and its principle. The author, William Cavanaugh, makes use of strong references to Christian resources, such as St. Augustine of Hippo and Hans Urs von Balthasar, to complete his augments with economic issues. William Cavanaugh is the senior research professor at the Centre for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology as well as professor of Catholic studies at DePaul University in Chicago. I believe that Cavanaugh successfully constructs his arguments and assembles a strong support for his goal of the book. Cavanaugh desired that the book would be useful and supportive of a form of theological microeconomics to which in my opinion it would be.

The book is structured into four chapters whereby each directly and formatively engages with a particular topic/argument that contributes towards the thesis. Each chapter contains a specific Christian resource as mentioned before. They also house a collection of real world examples …show more content…
The main objective of this chapter is to question to what degree the “free market” is actually free and what should we classify as freedom. Cavanaugh makes use of Augustine’s writing to bring a Christian perspective of freedom against Milton Friedman’s globally accepted ideology on free market. He draws out that one of the main issues with the “free market” is that it doesn’t have a telos, an account of the true end; this means the market doesn’t have end goal and so it cannot differentiate between true or false desires nor can it distribute power equally. Simply, one could say Cavanaugh believes that the “free market” is not truly free to nor supportive of all