Ooze Viral Blogger Review of Enough by Will Samson

I heard about this project from the good folks at the Ooze a while ago, and, never able to resist free books, I signed up.? The terms of the deal are that, when I want to, I can request a new theology book that the Ooze is featuring, and as long as I agree to review it here and link back to the Ooze Viral Blogger page, they pay for the book and for shipping.? Sweet deal, no?

Oh, yeah.? Here’s the link.

So the first book they sent my way was Enough: Contentment in an Age of Excess by Will Samson.? The folks at the Ooze sent me an email with a link to a .pdf excerpt from the book, some blurbs, and the author’s email address to request an interview.? (I didn’t avail myself of that one–I had to wrap up my semester, after all.)? So I suppose I should review it.

At the outset a potential reader should know what Will Samson does better than most books on Christianity and consumerism.? Unlike many of his counterparts, Samson keeps the content of Christian confession front and center throughout the book, articulating a case that checks on consumeristic desire are not decorative add-ons or concessions to some secular morality but flow from the very stuff of Christian doctrine.? The first sign that he is going to proceed thus happens in the first chapter of the book, when he modernizes Paul’s teaching on the eucharist from 1 Corinthians.? He asks the reader to imagine being in what seems like a typical Protestant Sunday morning service, when something unusual starts to happen:

Soon you will “take Communion.”? It seems such an odd phrase–to “take Communion.”? But it’s a ritual you know well.? You’ve been doing it almost all of your life.? A few years ago, you took it for granted, but now that you’re maturing a bit, you’ve been finding it more and more meaningful.

Finally, the sacrament begins.? A loaf of bread is broken as Christ’s body was broken.? Juice is poured out, telling the story of sacrifice and atonement.? Plates are passed around with these elements to share in the Eucharist.? A sense of excitement runs through you as you wait for Communion to come to you and your family.

But as the plates are being passed, you begin to notice some strange activities.? The woman in the big hat grabs a handful of bread cubes and shoves them in her mouth, then she takes another handful and stuffs them in her purse.? Her children are following the mom’s lead, cramming bread into pockets as the usher tries to wrangle the plate away from them.? You elbow your spouse who, mouth dropping, can’t believe it either.

And now, the teenagers seem to have some kind of party with the little cups of juice, downing them like shots, clinking the small glasses together and laughing loudly.? Oh sure, they look like they’re having the time of their lives, but this isn’t what the meal is for.? Surely Jesus didn’t die so some people could grab it all, while others are left out.

What is happening here?? You want to stand up and scream, “Stop!”? But the plates keep getting passed, others following suit with the party crowd, and by the time the elements reach you, there is nothing left.? No bread.? No cup.? Nothing.

There was supposed to be enough.? Wasn’t there?? (19-20)

Once I read that, I had gotten more out of this book’s first twenty pages than I’ve gotten out of the first two hundred pages of others.? Samson has a grasp throughout the book on the ancient roots of Christianity as genuine political community, neither a hobby-ritual for the salving of dirty conscience nor a mere religious veneer on this or that partisan affiliation.? His book straightway sets out consumption and production as genuine and potentially good human actions, setting them apart from the ideology of consumerism that would make everything, body and soul, neighbor and nature, mere goods for those with the money to consume.? He also presents readers with a fun new take on Pascal’s wager for an age of industrial pollution: if the world as we know it is coming to an end ten thousand years from now, it would? be disastrous to continue to pollute and very good to develop sustainable ways of living.? If the world is coming to an end ten days from now, it wouldn’t be all that bad to live sustainably, and it would be fun but vacuous to waste the world’s resources in the meantime.? A sucker for reworkings of old riffs as I am, I loved that bit.

I do think that Samson’s theology sometimes overextends the Scriptures and traditions to get to his point, and the pity is that he could have gotten there more rigorously.? Early in the book he renders a reading of Genesis 3 in which the chief sin of the man and the woman was “wanting more” than they already had.? Perhaps it’s because I’m a Miltonist, but I thought this brief remake of Paradise Lost was using a text tangentially related to his point for the sake of familiarity.? The point itself isn’t a bad one, and the pity of the moment was that there are other Bible stories, like Naboth’s vineyard and David and Absalom, that would have illustrated the point much more nicely.? That moment is not a heinous misreading, but it does illustrate a tendency throughout the book.

As I noted before, the grand shape of the book is to be commended; Samson throughout points to the large contours of Christian theology as the starting point for thinking about consumption, morality, the environment, and every other question he comes to in the book.? But on occasion, like the one I noted above, he gets tempted to use a “read and apply” hermeneutic, a sloppy proof-text-using moralism that doesn’t rise to his larger theological vision.? I don’t think there’s enough in there that it blunts the impact of the book at large, but it’s there nonetheless.

In the book’s closing chapters Samson offers a list of changes that I’d call lifestyle changes–eating local, praying the daily office, and other such things.? I know that some critics will point to these measures as veneer to put over a life with larger-scale problems, but I also know that most folks, myself included, though we’d like to think that we’d abandon home and family to follow Christ, are reluctant to abandon home and family if we’resupicious that it’s not Christ at all but simply the latest fad to come down the line.? With some wisdom, Samson realizes that one must live one’s self into such different ways of life, and his suggestions for prayerful and sustainable living provide good means for doing just that.

As I noted at the outset, what marks this book off from its anti-consumerism counterparts is its robust theological vision.? And I’ll say now that what marks it off from systematic theologies that happen to mention the consumerist culture is that it provides suggestions for living one’s way into seeing the world differently.? In all the book is a pastorally-minded, thinking person’s guide to consumerism and what the Christian tradition might have to say about it, and I imagine it might make quite a good book for a study group.