Book Review: Blessed Are the Consumers: Climate Change and the Practice of Restraint

Abstract

Blessed Are Consumers: Climate Change and Practice of Restraint. By Sallie McFague. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2013. 225 pp. $24.00 (paper).This volume by Sallie McFague brings her life's work reflecting on models of God-increasingly around crisis of climate change-into further focus through metaphor of kenosis or, as in subtitle, the practice of restraint. The book centers on pivotal role of world's religions in helping animate moral and spiritual conversion to reality needed if contemporary societies are to avoid ecological catastrophe. In fact, she asserts, shape of change needed-from consumerist gratification toward communal orientation to needs of most vulnerable-represents an invitation back to wellsprings of Christian (and other religious) tradition. What distinguishes McFague's book is her focus on spiritual autobiography: power of narrative in opening windows of what such conversion and simplicity might actually look like. The central chapters of book explore witness of three fitting her criteria of performative witness to exemplary life: John Woolman, Simone Weil, and Dorothy Day. Drawing on fifty years of studying and teaching writings of these figures, she develops four key strategies their lives manifest. All four are means of practicing radical self-emptying at heart of her vision: ( 1 ) entering wild space of voluntary poverty; (2) learning to be attentive to needs of others, especially material needs; (3) developing a universal self' able to encompass all life on earth, a self that has no limits; and (4) learning to practice kenosis both personally and publicly/politically in world. Bracketing these central chapters on saints and her four key practices of kenosis are introductory chapters on contemporary consumerism, as well as role of religion and change of worldview in a time of eco-systemic crisis (chapters 1 and 2), and final chapters on theology of kenosis more broadly and her personaltheological appropriation of these themes (chapters 7 and 8).I find much to appreciate in McFagues decision to center this study of kenosis in spiritual autobiography, a powerful lens for exploring questions of conversion. Her three saints show diverse facets of resistance to seduction of affluence: from Woolman s refusal to participate in any aspect of a slavery-driven economy, to Weil's orientation to beauty of world and suffering of her time, to Day's practice of little way of face-to-face hospitality joined to social action. These chapters on saints and four strategies McFague sees them offering, however, are also most frustrating in a book too often marred by unclear writing, repetition, imprecise distinctions, and a tendency toward dualism and generalization. …