released 11/28/2025

Today’s Friday Feature curates several past interviews regarding commercialism in America. Leigh Eric Schmidt, author of Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, 1997), explores how the marketplace has increasingly come to define each American holiday. David Lyon, author of Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times (Polity, 2000), discusses how consumerism has become a way of life, not just an occasional activity. Thomas Frank, author of The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago, 1998), argues that the anti-establishment ethos of the counterculture was not a new phenomenon in the 1960s but was already present in corporate America long before the Beatles showed up. And Sam Van Eman, author of On Earth As It Is in Advertising? Moving from Commercial Hype to Gospel Hope (Wipf and Stock, 2010), explains that through his work with students he has become increasingly aware of how advertising shapes their worlds, offering them an alternative gospel and selling them identities more so than products.

46 minutes

PREVIEW

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