Cardinal Timothy Dolan has an op-ed up at the New York Post about the way commercialism is infecting our celebration of Thanksgiving and robbing it of its humanness. (Or, as Brad Gregory would have it, the way the goods life is obstructing to good life.) I wish to make two points. First, I emailed my colleague Heidi Schlumpf, who wrote about this horrible Black Friday sales-a-thon mentality, and asked if she had begun ghostwriting for Cardinal Dolan! She says she has not, but I wonder....LOL. Second, it is not just refreshing, it is vital to the Church's understanding of the impediments to evangelization to see the most prominent churchmen in the country taking direct aim at the commercialism and consumerism of our culture. I worry about intellectual secularism, but not half as much as I worry about the secularizing effects of consumer culture.
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