
2021 HTI Book Prize Winner

Commodified Communion
Eucharist, Consumer Culture, and the Practice of Everyday Life

Antonio (Tony) Alonso
Resist! This exhortation animates a remarkable range of theological reflections on consumer culture in the United States. And for many theologians, the source and summit of Christian cultural resistance is the Eucharist. In Commodified Communion, Antonio Eduardo Alonso calls into question this dominant mode of theological reflection on contemporary consumerism. Reducing the work of theology to resistance and centering Christian hope in a Eucharist that might better support it, he argues, undermines our ability to talk about the activity of God within a consumer culture. By reframing the question in terms of God’s activity in and in spite of consumer culture, this book offers a lived theological account of consumer culture that recognizes not only its deceptions but also traces of truth in its broken promises and fallen hopes.
This is a fascinating, lucid, and engaging account of the problems with attempts to resist capitalist consumerism with an idealized logic of the Eucharist. It makes important contributions to liturgical and ritual studies and Eucharistic theologies, as well as to theological and ethical critiques of consumption and capitalism more broadly. Antonio Eduardo Alonso provides a nuanced assessment of the Eucharist that accords both with lived experience and theological tradition, taking the reality of sin and persistent injustice seriously and also recalling a divine grace that can be invoked not just in spite of but together with such human and material brokenness.
-Devin Singh, Dartmouth College