William T. Cavanaugh > Quotes

“To consume the Eucharist is an act of anticonsumption, for here to consume is to be consumed, to be taken up into participation in something larger than the self, yet in a way in which the identity of the self is paradoxically secured.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

“The way you buy has a lot to do with the way you worship and who you worship and what you worship.”
― William T. Cavanaugh

“Consumerism is a restless spirit that is never content with any particular material thing. In this sense, consumerism has some affinities with Christian asceticism, which counsels a certain detachment from material things. The difference is that, in consumerism, detachment continually moves us from one product to another, whereas in Christian life, asceticism is a means to a greater attachment to God and to other people. We are consumers in the Eucharist, but in consuming the body of Christ we are transformed into the body of Christ, drawn into the divine life in communion with other people. We consume in the Eucharist, but we are thereby consumed by God.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

“What counts as religious or secular in any given context is a function of different configurations of power. The question then becomes why such essentialist constructions are so common. I argue that, in what are called "Western" societies, the attempt to create a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is essentially prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state. The myth of religious violence helps to construct and marginalise a religious other, prone to fanaticism, to contrast with the rational, peace-keeping, secular subject. This myth can and is used in domestic politics to legitimate the marginalisation of certain types of practices and groups labeled religious, while underwriting the nation-state's monopoly on its citizens' willingness to sacrifice and kill. In foreign policy, the myth of religious violence serves to cast nonsecular social orders, especially Muslim societies, in the role of the villain. THEY have not yet learned to remove the dangerous influence of religion from political life. THEIR violence is therefore irrational and fanatical. OUR violence, being secular, is rational, peace making, and sometimes regrettably necessary to contain their violence. We find ourselves obliged to bomb them into liberal democracy.”
― William T. Cavanaugh

“In the ideology of the free market, freedom is conceived as the absence of interference from others. There are no common ends to which our desires are directed. In the absence of such ends, all that remains is the sheer arbitrary power of one will against another.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

“Economic relationships do not operate on value-neutral laws, but are rather carriers of specific convictions about the nature of the human person - the person's origins and
destiny. There is an implicit anthropology and an implicit theology in every economics.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

“The artificial preservation of local identities is essential to tourism. In other words, the tourist represents both the attempt to transcend all borders and identities and the simultaneous attempt to fix the identities of non-Western subjects within its gaze.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church

“The problem again is one of direction; Christianity moves from God to humanity, whereas idolatry moves from humanity toward the divine. The image of God restored in humanity by Jesus Christ is a gift of God, not a ladder which we can climb to attain God. A proper theology of nature can never be a way of obviating the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, as if we can simply read God off of the creation. The Incarnation, in other words, is a statement about how God has chosen to use material reality to reveal Godself, not a statement about the intrinsic revelatory nature of material reality as such.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

“a language is just a dialect with an army,”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church

“With regard to the current crisis, what we have seen in government bailouts is not so much the solution to the deeper problems behind the economic crisis as it is a deferral of the consequences to some later time.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church

“The economy as it is currently
structured would grind to a halt if we ever looked at our stuff and simply declared, "It is enough. I am happy with what I have.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

“For Augustine, on the other hand, sin is not a power but a weakness. Augustine uses the metaphors of slavery and sickness to discuss the nature of sin. In his Confessions he says of his own condition, before his conversion, that he was "bound not by an iron imposed by anyone else, but by the iron of my own choice."11 In his anti-Pelagian treatise, The Spirit and the Letter, he says: "How, if they are slaves of sin, can they boast freedom of choice?"" Or again, "by grace comes the healing of the soul from sin's sickness; by the healing of the soul comes freedom of choice."" Sin is not subject to free choice, properly speaking. The alcoholic with plenty of money and access to an open liquor store may, in a purely negative sense, be free from anything interfering with getting what he wants; but in reality he is profoundly unfree and cannot free himself. In order
for him to regain freedom of choice, he cannot be left alone. He can only be free by being liberated from his false desires and being moved to desire rightly.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

“According to Friedman, if individuals are voluntarily entering into exchanges from which both parties expect to benefit, then the market is free.
This is a fairly conventional definition of a free-market economy. It hinges on the insistence that exchanges be voluntary and informed. With regard to information, an exchange cannot be free if one party has deceived another, say, by selling the other a house without divulging a severe problem with termites. Barring such deception, however, Friedman is confident that the price system in a free-market economy transmits all the information needed to make exchanges informed.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

“The key question in every transaction is whether or not the transaction contributes to the flourishing of each person involved, and this question can only be judged, from a theological point of view, according to the end of human life, which is participation in the life of God.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

“This is the sense in which Augustine says "freedom of choice is not made void but established by grace, since grace heals the will whereby righteousness may freely be loved."" Freedom is something received, not merely exercised. Therefore, in order to determine whether a person is acting freely, we need to know much more than whether or not that person is acting on his or her desires without the interference of others. In Augustine's view, others are in fact crucial to one's freedom. A slave or an addict, by definition, cannot free himself or herself. Others from outside the self - the ultimate Other being God - are necessary to break through the bonds that enclose the self in itself. Humans need a community of virtue in which to learn to desire rightly.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

“When is a market free?"
With regard to the first corollary identified above, freedom in Augustine's view is not simply the absence of external interference. Augustine's view of freedom is more complex: freedom is not simply a negative freedom from, but a freedom for, a capacity
to achieve certain worthwhile goals. All of those goals are taken up into the one overriding telos of human life, the return to God. Freedom is thus fully a function of God's grace working within us. Freedom is being wrapped up in the will of God, who is the condition of human freedom. Being is not autonomous; all being participates in God, the source of being.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

“there is no point in being either for or against "the free market" as such. The key question is: When is a market free?”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire

“The key to true freedom is not just following whatever desires we happen to have, but cultivating the right desires. This means that the internal movement of the will is not a sufficient condition for freedom; we must consider
the end toward which the will is moved.”
― William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire