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Editor's Comments |
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Wise as Serpents, Innocent as Doves: Forming Counter-Cultural Christians in an Age of Consumer Media/Advertising
by Kaari Reierson
Viral marketing, product placement, and extensive consumer data gathering enable consumer advertising to reach its tentacles of influence deep into our lives. Disposable income and malleable social identity make youth a desirable demographic for commercial advertising. Unless they have the power to question and resist, youth can be formed into ultimate consumers.
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Featured Articles |
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Commodifying the Child: a historical look at the idolatry of the market and the Truth we have to tell
by Chad M. Rimmer
Consumer advertising can be viewed from many different ethical angles. Perhaps the most obvious ethical questions relate to areas such as the social, political and environmental limits of consumerism, or the psychosocial methods of advertising. Some historians, psychologists and sociologists have devoted their life to understanding the methods that influence a person's decision to buy a "good" product. This kind of ethical reflection is valuable because those methods may be 'good' or 'bad' in themselves. |
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Consumer Families, Virtue and the Common Good
by Mary M. Doyle Roche
The debate over what constitutes and how to live "family values" continues and revolves primarily around the meanings and practices of marriage. Receiving less attention is how Christian families, in whatever form, strive to live with justice and compassion in a culture that is increasingly characterized by individualism, unsustainable patterns of consumption, and competition. Rather than look at family life through the lens of sexual ethics, I propose to use the concept of the common good from the social teachings of the church and the language of virtue because they can spark the moral imagination of families and guide families in practices that both resist and transform the culture according to gospel values. |
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Contesting the Formative Power of Consumer Culture: Problems, Resources, Possibilities
by Jeremy D. Posadas
One of the most insidious aspects of the omnipresent advertising and branding that rule the lives of children and youth is the way it perpetuates a vastly diminished understanding of life in human society. Advertising portrays a world in which there is no poverty, there are no workers (and if there are workers, they are happy and never face injustice), and products are freely available, emerging ex nihilo without industrial effort or environmental impact. |
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Behind the Online Curtain: Online Advertising, Teens and the Christian Form
by Dianha Ortega-Ehreth
The advertising world has always been a bit of a mystery to me. I understand the concept of telling others about your product or service so that they might buy it. But the industry has exploded over the last several decades as I've crossed from my young adulthood of the 80's and 90's and over into parenthood in the not-new-anymore-millennium, and this is due primarily to the Internet. |
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Consumerism on Campus: A Lutheran Response
by Elizabeth Palmer
At the University where I serve as campus pastor, an undergraduate named James has found himself a lucrative job. He works as a Red Bull Student Brand Manager, which means he gets paid to attend campus events and hand out free cans of Red Bull energy beverage, take photos at parties and write blog entries, coordinate the occasional visit to campus of the legendary Red Bull automobile, and otherwise build excitement about the brand on the campus. |
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Shop the Fear Away, Girls! Man Up, Boys!
by Caryn D. Riswold
Their sheer pervasiveness makes it hard to believe that Disney Princesses, reality television, toy commercials demanding that boys are "just different," and the pinking of all things "girly" only took a commanding hold of our consumer culture after those jets brought down the World Trade Center towers live on morning television ten years ago. |
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Adolescent Identity in the midst of Malls and Amazon.com — living in an alternative economy
by Terri Martinson Elton
Today's young people are being socialized in a culture that projects a distorted sense of identity and agency.
Let me explain. Joyce Mercer, a practical theologian and professor of Christian education, makes the bold and startling assertion that American capitalism has remade and restructured childhood. Branded at an early age, young people are socialized into a society where consumerism and consumption have become the way people craft their way of life, including their relationships and social order. |
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Young Adults in Global Mission: Life without Consumerism
by Heidi Torgerson-Martinez
"Is that really what it’s like in the United States, Heidi?" asked an elderly friend as we sat around the kitchen table one afternoon. "Isn’t it true that everybody has their own bedroom and their own house? That everybody has cars and big televisions and Internet in their houses? I'd never go myself; I'm too old and too scared for that. But I understand why people do it." |
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Identity in Youth — Answers from a Therapist
by Kari Lyn Wampler
What goes into a young person’s sense of identity? Far and away the most pivotal influence on a young person's identity is their family. As Kids mature they are influenced by how their parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, cousins define them. Kids are like sponges. They soak up how we describe them and live in to that description. For instance if a child is told they are intelligent, they will act in accordance to that definition.
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Book Review |
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Reality Bites Back: We Can Fight Back
by Kaari Reierson
If, as I did, you used to have a subscription to People magazine (before I had children and lost all access to leisure time), and watched Real Housewives of Orange County before it became a franchise, this is the book for you. If, on the other hand, you’ve been living under a rock, don’t turn over the rock. The "real world" of reality television is scary.
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Preaching on Social Issues |
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Getting Your Meta On
by Clint Schnekloth
It seems as though many systematic treatments of ethics take great pains to disabuse readers of their assumptions as to what constitutes ethics in the first place. Then they can move on to doing ethics "proper" in the mode set forth by their systematic meta-approach. One of the more remarkable examples of this is the first paragraph of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics, which reads...
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