Quotes from William T. Cavanaugh

To consume the Eucharist is an act of anticonsumption, for here to consume is to be consumed, to be taken up into participation in something larger than the self, yet in a way in which the identity of the self is paradoxically secured.

The way you buy has a lot to do with the way you worship and who you worship and what you worship.

Economic relationships do not operate on value-neutral laws, but are rather carriers of specific convictions about the nature of the human person - the person's origins and destiny. There is an implicit anthropology and an implicit theology in every economics.

The artificial preservation of local identities is essential to tourism. In other words, the tourist represents both the attempt to transcend all borders and identities and the simultaneous attempt to fix the identities of non-Western subjects within its gaze.

In the ideology of the free market, freedom is conceived as the absence of interference from others. There are no common ends to which our desires are directed. In the absence of such ends, all that remains is the sheer arbitrary power of one will against another.

With regard to the current crisis, what we have seen in government bailouts is not so much the solution to the deeper problems behind the economic crisis as it is a deferral of the consequences to some later time.

there is no point in being either for or against "the free market" as such. The key question is: When is a market free?

a language is just a dialect with an army,

The key to true freedom is not just following whatever desires we happen to have, but cultivating the right desires. This means that the internal movement of the will is not a sufficient condition for freedom; we must consider the end toward which the will is moved.

The economy as it is currently structured would grind to a halt if we ever looked at our stuff and simply declared, "It is enough. I am happy with what I have.

The key question in every transaction is whether or not the transaction contributes to the flourishing of each person involved, and this question can only be judged, from a theological point of view, according to the end of human life, which is participation in the life of God.