Reviews for Religious Dimensions of Advertising (Religion, Culture, Critique Series)

The average rating for Religious Dimensions of Advertising (Religion, Culture, Critique Series) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-01-27 00:00:00 Van Car You know, I really had high hopes for this book, and even when I heard pretty harsh critiques of it from others, I gave it the benefit of the doubt, and assumed the critics were asses. But, it's really quite disappointing, even though I agree with where Long is trying to go in it. Two stars is low, and I certainly could give it three stars, on the basis of all the excellent and learned bits in it. But these bits are not developed into a coherent whole, but remain scattered and confusing. And I make it two stars on the basis of the "to whom much is given, much is expected" principle. Long was given the opportunity to write a book as part of the Radical Orthodoxy series--you can't get much more high-flying than that. And he blew it. Here's the longer review, that I typed up for class: This book had a lot of promise, but unfortunately, most of it was wasted by the poor organization and gaps in Long's argument. I found myself frustrated by at least four major structural deficiencies in this book. 1)Long's tendency to go into long asides and rabbit-trails which seem irrelevant to the point at hand. Sometimes, it turns out that they are in fact quite relevant, but you don't figure out how until much later; meanwhile, you're just confused. Often, though, Long never adequately demonstrates their relevance, and one gets the idea that Long simply had too many ideas spinning through his head and tried to cram them all into this book without first weeding through to find the really significant ones and then narrating them into a coherent whole. 2) Long's three-part division into dominant, emergent, and residual traditions. Although a strategy like this can be helpful for making sense of a very complicated jumble of thinkers, in this case the organizational strategy makes matters more, rather than less confusing. Much better, I think, would be to have taken a chapter to examine each of the major thinkers on his own terms, and in the process, point out areas of similarities and difference from each of the others. As it is, by trying to make thinkers with very diverse perspectives, emphases, starting-points, and ending-points fit into neat categories, he seems to rarely do justice to each thinker's perspective, or to make clear exactly what their weaknesses are. This was particularly glaring in the section on the "emergent tradition," in which I had really looked forward to the discussion of liberation theology. The liberation theologians, who, whatever their faults, took the historic Christian faith and the witness of Scripture seriously, were seriously mistreated by being lumped together with Cone and Ruether, both of whom (especially Ruether) denied much of orthodox Christian teaching. This was especially unhelpful, since Ruether and Cone contributed almost nothing to the discussion of economics per se. 3) The book failed to live up to its promise of telling us what theology has to do with economics, mainly because it didn't really tell us that much about economics, or engage with it in much detail. The review by Oslington, an economist, complained that Long seemed woefully ignorant of much of economics, and though I'm no economist, I was frustrated by the lack of precision and concreteness in Long's critiques of capitalism. The book was long on vague notions like "scarcity" and "freedom" and "value," but rather short on specific elucidations of the teachings of modern economics and its shortcomings. 4) Finally, on a related note, the book fell short when it came to offering clear solutions the the problems it identified. The third section, which I had hoped would finally provide some answers, remained somewhat unfocused and inconclusive. When he came to Milbank, Long finally seemed to have found someone that he could almost entirely agree with (though he still bickered with him about some issues which seemed rather tangential), but he closed the book without developing Milbank's solutions at any length or in terms of specific applications. Nevertheless, Long certainly has a fairly profound grasp of theology (at least the radically orthodox variety) and he offered excellent food for thought at a number of points. In particular, his critique of the fact-value distinction as a root problem of capitalism, and of theologies that endorse it, is quite fruitful. The world does not simply consist of neutral facts that we can subsequently modify in a limited degree on the basis of our values. Facts are inherently value-laden, for good or ill depending on whether or not they conform to their proper telos (the discussion of MacIntyre is especially helpful here). Theologians who accept this distinction conclude that economics can function as an autonomous science describing facts, over which theology can thin lay a thin veneer of values. Such an approach necessarily means that theology can only speak to economics in terms of vague abstractions, like "creation" "original sin" "freedom," etc. Since the discipline of economics has its own integrity as a true narrative of the world, the specific narrative of Christian theology has little to say to it. Thus theology is deprived of almost all of its uniquely Christian content before it can speak to economics, and its contribution becomes essentially meaningless, as Long shows fairly convincingly in his treatment of the dominant tradition. The same fact-value distinction is not adequately overcome by the emergent tradition, who still allow social science to do a lot of the work in describing the "facts" of the world, leaving theology's contribution insufficient. Another helpful point is how he shows that both the dominant and emergent traditions have espoused too much a negative notion of freedom, a liberty which seeks freedom from all oppressive constraints. Because of this, neither has been able to sustain a robust ecclesiology, for the Church is necessarily a restraint on such libertine freedom, although it enables the richer freedom of life in God. Long rightly sees (although I think he inadequately develops) that a proper answer to the problems that capitalism poses can only be achieved through the form of ecclesiology. Anyhow, a much better read by the same author on the same topic is Calculated Futures. --- update: after discussion in class and some reflection, I decided to be a bit nicer, and give him three stars, though with some hesitation.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-03-11 00:00:00 Paul Bull Didn't get too much out of this book. Long looks at the theological content of a few of the more extreme amalgams of religion and economics. He points out how some who have adopted the neoliberal view see free markets as being holier than the Gospel message itself (God help us!) And also the liberation theology movement, which more or less sought to transform scripture into a class conflict metaphor. Running with the Radical Orthodox crowd, Long drives home when and how economics ceased to be a matter of religious importance and subsequently how more modern attempts to revive the two generally see theology bowing toward secular economics.