AUSTIN AREA EVENTS

In this powerful new video, Juliet Schor scrutinizes what she calls "the new consumerism"--a national phenomenon of upscale spending that is shaped and reinforced by a commercially-driven media system. She argues that "keeping up with the Joneses" is no longer enough for middle and upper-middle class Americans, many of whom become burdened with debilitating debt as they seek to emulate materialistic TV lifestyles.

Drawing on her academic research, Schor explains the cultural forces that cause Americans to work longer hours and spend more than they can afford in order to participate in a consumption competition with others. The video illustrates with numerous examples how more and more products are being used as social communicators to demonstrate material success. The Overspent American challenges the inevitability of the consumer lifestyle by proposing alternatives to the work and spend cycle that has so many Americans feeling trapped and unfulfilled. The video draws attention to--and ultimately raises serious questions about--the costs (both financial and societal) of relentlessly searching for happiness and identity through consumption. 

Discussion afterwards lead by Professor Robert Jensen.

Robert Jensen, a longtime activist fighting for women's rights, racial equality, and global justice, reveals with this book the emotional journey that brought him back to the church after an entire adulthood of religious indifference.

Our world is perched on the verge of chaos, he warns. As political, economic, cultural, and ecological crises peak, the decisions we make are likely to have permanent consequences for our future and for the fate of our planet. In our nation, what underlies this chaos is a spiritual unrest, a stubborn conflict that has gotten in the way of understanding and slowed theological progress to a glacial crawl.

Drawing on the Old and New Testaments, contemporary philosophy, common sense, personal intuition, and progressive politics, Jensen offers a full defense of his conclusion, holding its consistency up to the best of religious and secular teachings. A touchingly open memoir that is also a study of the religious debate in America, "All My Bones Shake" marks an entirely new communion: a way to look at religion as a tool with which we may create closer ties to all humanity and begin to create a just and sustainable society--to face with confidence the uncertainty of our lives. Both political and spiritual, radical and universal, public and very personal, Jensen's warmhearted text is a passionate testament to the potential of religion to offer sanity and stability in the face of our culture's growing turmoil.