Ecumenism, Abortion and Consumerism: Texts Available Online

The good folk at Wipf and Stock have made available a sample chapter of Justice, Unity & the Hidden Christ, written by the Divine Wedgie’s Matthew Tan. The chapter is also available for download and can be accessed by clicking here.

Another scholarly publication includes an article in Solidarity: the Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, published out of the University of Notre Dame in Sydney. The article is entitled “Abortion in/as a Consumer Structure“. The abstract to the article reads:

This article argues that the contemporary acceptability of abortion is not solely due to the Liberal imperative to exercise individual choice. Rather, abortion’s acceptability needs to be explained with reference to the techniques of consumer culture. This article will begin by explaining how practices in general predispose one to gravitate towards one form of practices rather than another. It will then look at how consumer practices generate a biopolitics of economic efficiency and corporeal commodification which culminates in a politics of visibility. Under such conditions, even basic categories like mere existence is dependent on its ability to be displayed for public view. This article will conclude by reflecting on the necessity of forging the Church not as a subsection of a public framed by consumerism, but as an alternative public in its own right

The article (the full text of which can be accessed here) has been doing the rounds and has caused the requisite amount of offense to those on the left and the right, though interestingly it was those on the right who first voiced their displeasure. The article has also been picked up by two blogs, Waiting for Godot to Leave and Cosmos in the Lost.