Lexington Books / Fortress Academic
Pages: 142
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-9787-0705-4 • Hardback • December 2022 • $95.00 • (£73.00)
978-1-9787-0706-1 • eBook • December 2022 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Christine Darr is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Dubuque.
1. Recent Christian Ethical Reflection on “Consumerism”
2. Human Desire in a Consumerist Culture
3. Practice, Advertising, and the American Dream
4. Cultivating Virtue within American Capitalism
5. Consumer Practice as a Possible School for Virtue
For those rightly concerned with the ways consumerism deforms desire, Christine Darr gives us something worth consuming – a wonderful treatment of the habits of consumption and how they interact with habits of character. However, much more than and certainly far more helpful than a simple diatribe, Darr’s excavation of how desire is formed and shaped in pursuit of the American Dream – in conversation with the likes of Aquinas, Bourdieu and MacIntyre – gives the reader important tools for becoming a more reflective, and one hopes, freer and more responsible consumer. In this regard, the treatments of the virtue temperance and the practice of cooking are gems.
— Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Utah Valley University