{"id":2058,"date":"2012-11-27T15:25:21","date_gmt":"2012-11-27T20:25:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nd.edu\/thecc\/?p=2058"},"modified":"2012-11-27T15:25:21","modified_gmt":"2012-11-27T20:25:21","slug":"a-spending-showdown-american-consumerism-vs-charitable-giving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/2012\/11\/27\/a-spending-showdown-american-consumerism-vs-charitable-giving\/","title":{"rendered":"A Spending Showdown: American Consumerism vs. Charitable Giving"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black Friday<\/a> doesn\u2019t seem to be going anywhere as an American cultural phenomenon.\u00a0 In fact, what used to be a one-day kickoff to the Christmas shopping season on the Friday after Thanksgiving has become a frenzied four-day shopping weekend culminating in what\u2019s recently been dubbed Cyber Monday<\/a>, the biggest online shopping day of the year.\u00a0 This past weekend, many retailers even offered enticing discounts on Thanksgiving evening itself, so that while some families enjoyed pumpkin pie and conversation, retailers like Walmart\u00a0were processing \u201cnearly 10 million register transactions\u201d and rang up \u201calmost 5,000 items per second.” \u00a0With spending estimated<\/a> at $59.1 billion, up 12.8 percent from last year,\u00a0its hard not to be unsettled by American materialism.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, in his address at the fall general assembly of U.S. bishops<\/a>, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigan\u00f2, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States suggested that while \u201cAmerican ways and styles of life marked by materialism and consumerism\u2026have contributed to leading her astray from the values of the Gospel. <\/em>Yet, these Gospel values, by the grace of God, although strongly confronted by secular society, are still very much alive in the Church in America.<\/em>\u201d \u00a0<\/em>Perhaps one of the most hopeful ways in which Americans are embodying these Gospel values in response to materialism and consumerism is through an alternative, even subversive, form of spending: voluntary charitable giving.<\/p>\n

One of Brian Starks’ findings in his newly published\u00a0report on the Catholic giving gap<\/a> is that those who are less materialistic in their values are more likely to be engaged in charitable giving, as the attached graph from that report suggests.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But in a very real way, charitable giving also financially limits those who give to such causes from pursuing materialistic lifestyles. \u00a0The report’s\u00a0findings highlight the twofold tension between materialistic values and charitable giving. \u00a0On the one hand, those who reject materialistic values will presumably have more money to give to charity, insofar as money not spent on material possessions is “freed up” for another purpose, such as monetary giving. On the other hand, those who give more also presumably reduce the amount they can spend on material goods, insofar as money allocated for charitable giving is “tied up” from material spending.<\/p>\n

The choice to give charitably invites a reorientation toward non-material values, and hopefully in religious communities, toward “Gospel values” which Archbishop Vigan\u00f2\u00a0contrasts with “American ways and styles of life marked by materialism and consumerism.” \u00a0One’s actions are a concrete statement to and for oneself about the prioritization of values such as generosity and concern for the needy over materialistic values.<\/p>\n

Put simply, one way of simplifying your life is to give your money away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Black Friday doesn\u2019t seem to be going anywhere as an American cultural phenomenon.\u00a0 In fact, what used to be a one-day kickoff to the Christmas shopping season on the Friday after Thanksgiving has become a frenzied four-day shopping weekend culminating … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":858,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/858"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2058"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2077,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2058\/revisions\/2077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/thecc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}