Download Tom Beaudoin, Consuming Faith Reading Questions

CCS 400 Leininger
Consuming Faith Reading Questions
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Tom Beaudoin, Consuming Faith Reading Questions
Note: Unless otherwise indicated, answer each question according to Beaudoin’s
(abbreviated as “B’s”) arguments in Consuming Faith. In addition, reflect on whether
you agree with B’s arguments and the reasons for your agreements and disagreements.
Chapter One: Living in a Branded Culture
1. Class Exercise: Write 2 brand names on the board. Then describe the
image, lifestyle, personality, and values associated with the brand.
2. How might this exercise help to illustrate B’s thesis? First, state his
thesis and then the support that he offers for it.
3. What is the relationship between personal identity and brands?
4. Between spirituality and brands?
5. Why is lack of transparency about the conditions of production a
problem?
6. What influence do brands have on your identity? Your notions of
happiness? Your spirituality? The friends you choose? The vocation
you are considering?
7. What does B mean by globalization?
8. Evaluate B’s argument. What did he get right (or hit) and what did he
get wrong (or miss)? What should he have argued about the role of
brands in our culture and our lives?
9. Why does he title the book as he does? This chapter? Be sure to ask
this question for each reading throughout the semester.
Ch. 2 A Divine Economy
1. How does B define the following:
a) spirituality?
b) economics?
2. According to B, what is the relationship between salvation and
economic relationships? How should spirituality shape economic
relationships? What about vice versa?
CCS 400 Leininger
Consuming Faith Reading Questions
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3. Explain: “In Jesus economics and spirituality are united without
confusion.”
4. What are the two central principles of Jesus’ economic spirituality?
Do you agree that that Jesus had an economic spirituality? Why or
why not?
5. Assess B’s interpretation and use of Scripture to support his
arguments. What does he get right or wrong and why?
6. What problems does B see with contemporary spirituality? What
problems or advantages do you see? (Did B miss anything?)
7. Why does B emphasize that God is uncontrollable? What does B
identify as the basis for God’s final judgment of our lives and why?
Ch. 3 Today’s Spiritual Discipline: The Brand
Economy (optional reading)
1. Explain Harvey Cox’s statement on p. 56: “We treat not just brands
but the market as God—omnipotent, omniscient, and
omnipresent, inscrutable in its ways. . . . We need only render our
full trust in this market-as-God and all will be well.”
2. Explain why you agree and/or disagree with the following: “The
brand economy is the place where the spiritual tug of war takes place
for many young people.”
3. Suggested: go to campus ministry and ask for a flyer that describes the
Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola and how to do one of
these exercises (or search the web)
4. How might the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius be used to resist
marketing’s influence on our imaginations?
5. What are your dreams of success? What has shaped these dreams?
How do your dreams compare with the images of success conveyed in
marketing? What role, if any, has marketing played in forming your
dreams?
CCS 400 Leininger
Consuming Faith Reading Questions
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Ch. 4 Bodies and Branding
1. How have Christians viewed the body and why? What effects have
these views had upon Christian participation in the economy? How
might Beaudoin use a correlation between increases in presence of
U.S. style marketing and increases in the rates of eating disorders in
third world countries to support his arguments?
2. How does B answer the question: “Was Jesus divine or human?”
How do American Christians tend to answer this question? What is
docetism? What role has economics played in the way Christians
have viewed Jesus?
3. Why does B think that Christian answers to the question: “Was Jesus
human or divine” can either reinforce or help to correct economic
injustices? Explain the terms “performative view” and “performative
docetism?”
4. How do American Christians need to change the way they
a) view their own bodies as well as those of others, and
b) their participation in the brand economy?
Why would you agree and/or disagree?
5. How do corporations shape the relationships between consumers and
the workers who produce the goods that they consume? What is
“corporate transcendence” and “brand weightlessness?” How would
you improve relationships between consumers and workers as a
a) corporate executive,
b) government policy maker, and
c) consumer?
6. What problems and economic injustices does B see in the
relationships between brands and the bodies who make the brands?
How does B define a living wage? What just and/or unjust
dimensions of the brand economy does he miss?
7. Analyze the following argument: “Bad or even inhumane working
conditions are better than no job at all.” What assumptions does this
argument make about the available choices? Why should one accept
or challenge these assumptions?
CCS 400 Leininger
Consuming Faith Reading Questions
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Ch. 5 Economic Spirituality: Starting with
the Body
1. According to B, there are two primary ways of imagining the body of
Christ and its relationship to the world. Explain these two views and
B’s arguments about why one is better.
2. Explain how Drew Leder understands the human body and its
relationship to the world (see especially the passages on p. 86). Does
he view it a closed or an open system? Explain why. How might his
analysis help Christians imagine the body of Christ?
3. What implications does a proper understanding of the body of Christ
have for whether Christians should embrace or resist individualism?
Is it possible to resist individualism in our society?
Ch. 6 A Maturing Economic Spirituality
1. What is the best argument that could be made in support of
Beaudoin’s statement: “The way we spend our money is an expression
of our faith. Every purchase is as powerful an endorsement or
negation of faith in God as any prayer, promise, or creed” (94).
2. What is the best argument that could be made to challenge Beaudoin’s
statement?
3. Why do you agree and/or disagree with the following: “This
generation rejects the idea that we must choose one system or another.
It is ambivalent about our consumer culture.”
4. Explain the following: “Economy seems like an inevitable law of
human nature and not a human choice/arrangement (96)”.
5. Explain B’s distinction between direct and indirect approaches to
economic spirituality. What are strongest examples of each offered
by B? What alternatives would you suggest? What structural changes
would help to make our economic system more just?