Enough: Contentment in an Age of Excess

ill Samson hooked me early in this new book. He paints an image of the communion table where one person eats all of the elements. One person devours all of the bread and the wine and none is left for anyone else. The Eucharist, the beautiful good gift of God that was given to show us how to live is hoarded and misused. "Surely Jesus didn't die so some people could grab it all , while others are left out." "There was supposed to be enough. Wasn't there?" With that the book enters in to a very well paced and sourced discussion of how we as modern Christians need to deal with our poor stewardship of all that God has entrusted us with. Enough goes beyond a simple argument of how we manage tangible resources and digs deep into how well we steward who we are and how we steward our relationships (personally and communally). One of the elements I love about this book is the pacing. The chapters move well and are just the right blend of insight from Samson who clearly has something to add to the Christian conversation about how much is enough. Samson also really uses sources well and the quotes and statistics really seem to land at the right spots. I have burned out a couple of highlighters on this book and the quotes he uses from other writers and thinkers especially seem to land Samson's arguments and even take them further. One section of the book that is really dear to me is where Samson moves the discussion towards our poor view of what it means to be a follower of Christianity and not Christ. He lands the idea of civil religion well and speaks to how we have been sold on the idea that the world will burn and how we steward it really doesn't matter. We often more than we know are part of system that acts this way, even if this not what we believe at our core. I think he really lands well the idea that if you were watching us behave from 10,000 feet you would see consumers first and Christians second or maybe even third. The final section of the book really ends well with a very thoughtful discussion that has some great suggestions mixed in. The suggestions for moving beyond being consumers are really simple easy ideas that could radically change believers, if they were embraced. I felt like I could go out and implement most all of them this week. It wouldn't be easy, but it is possible. I could see how just a few simple steps could really change my family and effect those who live around me. I really appreciated this book and will for sure be adding it to my "need to read" list for our community. As I read and read the Eucharist story from early on never left my head. It was the perfect backdrop for this book and is an amazing image of how we appear to live. This book with that image and much much more could be a great way for Christians to begin the discussion on modeling better stewardship to a culture that desperately needs to see it.

Will Samson had a typical childhood background growing up in the typical American church. Samson is white, middle class and suburban. Or he was, before exiting his "typical" evangelical life for "greener" pastures, which has worked itself out as a more socially conscious and environmentally oriented Christ follower. Currently a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Kentucky, Samson is excellently qualified to write on the dicey subject of Christianity, contentment and the foibles and follies of the church at large. Having personally lived on both sides of the fence, he espouses a refreshingly stark look at Christianity's strengths and weaknesses by asking believers to confront their beliefs, ask the hard questions, and then proceed to move into society for the good of others and to better emulate Jesus. With noteworthy commentary on Communion and the "common table" of Christianity, Samson explores various metaphors frequently taken for granted or misunderstood by Christians. He similarly focuses on challenging believers to grasp the fact that God has made the church sufficient to work in the world. As Samson continues, he discusses the importance of viewing the Trinity rightly, as a social relationship, whereupon we as God's social creatures "are meant to create communities that reflect that union..." And the clincher: "How does that affect the way we think about our resources?" Readers will appreciate Samson's candidness, and his personal history will offer evangelicals insight into his choices and decisions for present-day actions. Samson enthusiastically tackles such topics as people who are consumed by "stuff" and the kinds of stuff that captivate and ruin lives. He also details the ins and outs of consumerism --- how views of God alter an individual's choices, specifics on Jesus and sustainability, and the Spirit of the Antichrist and how believers must re-imagine the readiness of Christ's return. Of extra interest are Samson's chapters that delve into the practicalities of wide-range subjects pertinent to every person, including body (lifestyle diseases and the mind-body connection), earth (food, energy and much more), economy (God and capitalism and paying for the party) and community (loss of moral center and fragmented lives/communities). It is in this section that readers will find hands and feet to their newly discovered intentions. Every chapter describes the current "reading" in our culture and its associated downfalls. Samson aligns this information with scriptural principles and then makes suggestions for implementing said principles. While not every Christian will agree with his premises, Samson has done the church a great service in pulling together the incongruities of the "haves and have-nots" and how the church is to reach out and meet such needs. Whether by gently nudging (or a guilt-inspired inner shove), every contemporary Christian should read this text and spend some time re-evaluating how well their faith w

When I first started this book, I half-expected it to be a diatribe against modern culture, focusing on the sins of our excess. While the book does mention those excesses, what I found instead was a call to live into true church community. Will encourages us to say "enough" to the consumeristic tendencies that have overtaken our personal lives, our churches, or friendships, and our theology and return to a Christ-centered practice instead. The book is divided into two main sections. The first is an accessible exploration of the ways we have let consumeristic mindsets control who we are. And the second is a practical section that explores the areas of our lives in which we can say "enough" and provides broad suggestions for alternative ways of living. Both sections are easy to read, full of stories and examples, and do a good job of explaining ideas and trends in culture. While I personally found myself wishing for more substance in parts of the book, I found it as a whole to be a great introduction to the idea of exploring how our lives reflect what we believe. The main call in the book is for us to live eucharistic lives. Living eucharistically "is to find ourselves in a community of others seeking the same, seeking to follow God in the way of Jesus.". But instead of living radically in that way, Will argues that we make do on low-cost, low-commitment substitutes. We exchange Christian community for the easy "personal decision for Christ." We exchange the command of stewardship for a "eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die get raptured" theology. We have failed to realize that what we do, where we live, and what we buy reflects our theology. Will reminds us though that our lives are a gospel account "written in public for all to see" and calls us to question what sort of story we are telling. He encourages us to abandon the story of how our inner longings push us to consume more and more, and adopt a story of finding a place in the presence of God and the community of believers. I'd recommend Enough to those who are wondering if there is a different way to follow Jesus that just doesn't rubberstamp the culture. This is a book for those who want to live redemptively but who have no idea where to begin. Will does a good job in providing a biblical guideline for how we can start to rethink our interactions with others and with the world and live in a way that makes the term "Christ-follower" mean something tangible.

[ This review originally appeared on englewoodreview.org ] There are any number of books being written at present about economics; many of these that have been on my reading list have to do with the sorry state of the global food economy. Take, for instance, The End of Food, a thorough and necessary account of food economies, but one that commonly assumes a default of "a food economy...defined by scarcity." Indeed, the buzzwords of current economic discourse all seem to connote doom and gloom: "economic downturn," "recession anxiety," etc. So how welcome is Will Samson's new book Enough: Contentment in an Age of Excess, which goes right to the heart of modern economics, namely that "we are people consumed by stuff" (notably, this point is missing from almost all conversation about "the economy"). Further, as Samson goes out of his way to make clear that he understands this problem to be theological as much (or more) than just cultural, he posits that "we are not consumed by an incarnational God the same way we are consumed by stuff." To begin to address the question of consumerism, the "way of thinking about stuff that believes the consumption of things...is what will...make us content," Samson makes some general remarks that guide the rest of the book, and that I hope will inform an even broader conversation: "Is there enough for everyone? This is an economic question, and in our discussion here I am certainly going to try and address the question from an economic perspective. But it is not just an economic question, is it? In fact, the question of whether there are sufficient resources in this world may be one of the most important theological questions of our time. How we answer it reveals much regarding our belief about the character of God: who we think God is, how we think God provides for the creation, and what role humans play in that work - this all relates directly to our understanding of God." Samson's understanding of the kingdom of God is first of all radically incarnational; it is played out in every facet of the world, "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." Secondly, it is communal, realized most fully in the gathered body, what Samson names the "Eucharistic community." The Eucharist meal is the common image of abundance throughout Enough, and seems particularly appropriate this Easter week. Samson reminds that this meal is the model for the church: "the bread and wine are made of other elements but are no longer able to be described as a simple composite of these elements: they have become new creations. In the same way, we are called to give of ourselves to our communities and to the world. But, we are called as communities to do so" (emphasis added). Additionally, the elements are "given graciously," the meal is sensual and physical, and it "provides an alternative telling of the other stories that have come to dominate the church in modernity." The flesh and blood of the Eucharist meal, then,

Enough: Commitment in an Age of Excess Will Samson. David C. Cook, $14.99 paper (256p) ISBN 978-0-7814-4542-9 Tailor-made for an age of anxiety, this volume, written particularly for Christians, attempts to address and answer the author's question: "What would it be like to be formed by communities consumed by God and God's vision for the world?" The author, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Kentucky, indicts Christians for supporting a cultural obsession with consumption, a constrictive view of morality and a narrow view of God. Threading his own conservative evangelical background and his family's present experiences as part of an intentional community throughout the book, the author also uses Scripture to delineate an alternative vision: countercultural "Eucharistic Communities" that offer their resources to the world. The first chapters of the book include cultural, sociological and theological analysis of the dilemmas of consumption and contrasts them with the writer's vision of God's call to abundant life in Christ. In the second part, Samson offers detailed, practical ideas on how believers can make lifestyle changes aimed at embracing wholeness in connecting belief and practice as the people of God. (Mar.)