Summary Of Being Consumed: Economics And Christian Desire By Cavanaugh

At its essence Cavanaugh’s book explores economics in light of the Christian faith. The title of the book, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire, is an appropriate one, because it relates well to the content matter discussed in the book. This book deals with the free market and questions whether this market really is free. Cavanaugh suggests that the definition of freedom as proposed by free market ideology is indeed not freedom at all, because any desire that exists in the absence of a good end, in other words, that does not have its end in God, the creator, means nothing and therefore is not freedom at all. He suggests that unless our desires are in God, and unless He truly satisfies us, we will never be satisfied, but plagued by endless desire and trapped by continuous consumption to give us a sense of worth. Therefore, he suggests that the Eucharist, which is the Christian practise of consumption, be the Christian alternative. He contrasts this act of consumption, with the consumption that takes place in the free market and explains that this act of consumption is an inside out consumption, in that by …show more content…
Our consumption of the Eucharist means we are consumed into the body of Christ, and therefore we are all connected through this act, thus when one hurts, we all do, because “when we consume the Eucharist, we become one with others and share their fate” and it is through this act that “we participate in the divine life so that we are fed and simultaneously become food for others” (2008:95/97). Therefore, he concludes that the Eucharist tells a different story of consumption, one in which “the insatiability of human desire is absorbed by the abundance of God’s grace in the gift of the body and the blood of Christ”