Commercial Debasement

“You have to wade through a lot of postmodernist/Marxist jargon in the Australian journalist Guy Rundle’s ‘The Meaning of Black Friday,’ but the end is to the point. . . .  ‘It was only when the encroachment of Black Friday on Thanksgiving became absurd, a stuffing, a farce, that mainstream media began to sit up and take notice. The fact that this could even occur — that a sales event could wholly encroach on a collective holiday that lies at the root of national identity — is a measure of how decayed and compromised that identity has become’.”

That’s the opening of today’s column for Aleteia, Protecting Thanksgiving From the Cannibals. In it I examine the commercial encroachment upon Thanksgiving and what that does to our shared public culture, and what it says about the kind of corporations that seek profit without concern for the social costs, with a suggestion for what the Church should do in response — how she can speak prophetically about economics the way she now speaks prophetically about marriage.

One of the main points: “Just because people want to buy things does not mean you have to sell them.”

Here it is.