Commodified Communion

OPTalksBookspodcast2021 Book Prize
Written By Open Plaza

Dr. Erica Ramírez talks to Dr. Tony Alonso about his new book on Eucharist, consumer culture, and the practice of everyday life

Flea market in San Jose, California, 2016. Photo: Jim Johnson

 
 

Dr. Antonio “Tony” Alonso talks to Dr. Erica Ramirez about what informed his recently published book Commodified Communion: Eucharist, Consumer Culture, and the Practice of Everyday Life (Fordham University Press, 2021). “Reducing the work of theology to resistance and centering Christian hope in a Eucharist that might better support it,” Dr. Alonso argues, “undermines the 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 it, the 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.”

 
 
 

[Commodified Communion] is a fascinating, lucid, and engaging account of the problems with attempts to resist capitalist consumerism with an idealized logic of the Eucharist…Antonio Eduardo Alonso provides a nuanced assessment of the Eucharist that accords both with lived experience and theological tradition…

—Devin Singh, Dartmouth College

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Tony Alonso

Dr. Antonio (Tony) Alonso is currently Assistant Professor of Theology and Culture at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, where he also serves as the inaugural Director of Catholic Studies. Dr. Alonso works at the intersection of theology and culture, with a particular focus on worship and ritual practices. In 2019, he was awarded the Catherine Mowry LaCugna Award for new scholars for the best academic essay in the field of theology within the Roman Catholic tradition from the Catholic Theological Society of America for his essay "Listening for the Cry: Certeau Beyond Strategies and Tactics" (Modern Theology, 2017). Dr. Alonso's first book, Commodified Communion: Eucharist, Consumer Culture, and the Practice of Everyday Life (Fordham University Press, 2021), offers a theological account of contemporary consumerism and its relationship to the Eucharist. It was awarded the 2021 Hispanic Theological Initiative Book Prize, an award that recognizes the best book written by a junior Latinx scholar on theology or religion each year. His current research, funded by a Teacher-Scholar Vital Worship Grant from the Calvin Institute for Worship, focuses on the theological significance of the transformation of Catholic material culture in the wake of the Second Vatican Council's liturgical reforms. In addition to his scholarly work, Dr. Alonso is a Latin Grammy-nominated composer of sacred music. The author of over 200 published compositions and arrangements, he was commissioned to compose the responsorial psalm for the first Mass Pope Francis celebrated in the United States in 2015.

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Erica Ramírez

Dr. Erica M. Ramírez is Director of Applied Research at Auburn Seminary. A fifth-generation Texan, with deep roots in San Antonio, she was previously the Richard B. Parker Assistant Professor of Wesleyan Thought and Heritage at Portland Seminary in Portland, Oregon. Ramirez holds a PhD in Sociology of Religion at Drew University, where she studied under the late Otto Maduro, a leading sociologist of his generation. Her dissertation revisited the Azusa Street mission revival through the frame of the maternal divine, working with themes of revolution, disruption, and the carnivalesque. With broad interests in religion, contemporary politics, and culture, Dr. Ramirez is particularly interested in “how radical religious traditions present as a challenge to and resource against social oppression.” Bridging popular and scholarly audiences, she co-wrote an article on Pentecostals and Donald Trump for The Washington Post and has contributed scholarly articles to Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, Canadian Journal of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity, and Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. She has presented academic papers to the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Association for the Sociology of Religion, and the Red de Investigadores de Fenómenos Religiosos Annual Meeting. Dr. Ramirez is a Hispanic Theological Initiative scholar and a fellow of both the Forum for Theological Exploration and the Louisville Institute. She has three children with her husband, Chris: Judah, Julia, and Camilla.

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