Dr. EunHye Grace So of Pacific School of Religion participated in this year’s GTU Conversation: Moral Imagination and the Economics of Consumption, an annual interdisciplinary gathering sponsored by the deans of the Graduate Theological Union member schools.
The conversation invited scholars from across the GTU to reflect on the question: To what extent does an economy of consumption affect our moral imagination, and how can moral imagination reshape how we understand relationships of consumption?
Representing PSR, Dr. So offered a theological and rhetorical reflection on how economies of consumption shape moral imagination by disciplining perception, desire, and communal identity. Drawing from Aristotelian concepts of ethos and moral formation alongside Paul’s letter to the Galatians, her presentation examined how systems of consumption train persons to evaluate themselves and others according to utility, productivity, visibility, and exchangeability. Dr. So also explored Paul’s counter-vision of communal life grounded in interdependence, mutual responsibility, and the “new creation” (Gal 6:15), arguing that moral imagination can interrupt systems that reduce persons, labor, and creation to consumable value.
The full text of her presentation appears below:
Moral Imagination under an Economy of Consumption
March 18, 2026
Dr. EunHye Grace So (Pacific School of Religion)
I argue that an economy of consumption affects moral imagination by shaping perception, disciplining desire, and structuring how persons understand one another. Consumption is not simply a matter of goods. It is also a matter of formation. It cultivates habits of valuation, trains attention, and establishes norms regarding what is visible, desirable, and worthy of concern.
Moral imagination is socially formed through repeated practices, shared narratives, and persuasive environments—in Aristotelian terms, through ethos. Aristotle understands moral formation as habituation: repeated practices do not merely express character; they produce it. An economy of consumption is a formative environment that trains valuation, desire, and judgment.
In light of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, Paul is seeking to reconstitute a community’s understanding of identity and life together. Paul does not construe human identity as self-generated or secured through socially recognized markers of worth. Rather, identity is bound to participation in what Paul calls the “new creation” (καινὴ κτίσις Gal 6:15).
An economy of consumption affects moral imagination profoundly by training persons to perceive value in terms of usefulness, exchangeability, visibility, and advantage. Under such conditions, it becomes natural to assess a person, a relationship, or a vocation by productivity, efficiency, or benefit rather than by goodness, justice, or faithfulness.
One danger of an economy of consumption is that it narrows the field of value. When usefulness becomes the dominant measure, persons may be reduced to functions, labor may disappear into the finished commodity, and ecological devastation may be obscured by convenience. Such a system depends upon distance: distance from sites of production, exploited labor, environmental degradation, and the bodies that absorb the cost of comfort. Over time, this distance becomes moral. We learn not only to consume, but also to overlook.
Galatians clarifies another dimension of the problem: the formation of desire. In Galatians 5, Paul’s contrast between the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit is not merely a contrast between bad and good acts. More fundamentally, it concerns rival modes of life and rival processes of communal formation. The problem with an economy of consumption is not only that it encourages acquisition. More deeply, it fosters a desire for self-advancement, competition, and accumulation rather than for mutual responsibility and shared flourishing.
At the same time, Galatians offers a counter-vision. Paul seeks to unsettle systems that assign worth through socially legible distinctions and then treat those distinctions as morally determinative. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female” (Gal 3:28). This is not a denial of difference. It is a rejection of any social order in which difference is reduced to hierarchy and hierarchy is reduced to value. Likewise, the exhortation to “bear one another’s burdens” (Gal 6:2) imagines a community ordered not by acquisition, but by interdependence.
This is where moral imagination becomes critical. It can render visible what consumer logic prefers to conceal. It can interrupt the reduction of persons to functions, of labor to cost, and of creation to resources. It can also help reform desire by orienting communities toward dignity, mutuality, and care.
An economy of consumption affects moral imagination by training persons to perceive the world through utility, exchange, and disposability. Yet moral imagination—especially when cultivated within theological communities and practices—can interrupt that formation. It can recover interdependence, restore moral visibility, and remind us that persons, labor, and creation possess a value that cannot be reduced to consumption. What is finally at risk is our capacity to recognize worth beyond usefulness, price, and convenience.
Watch the Full Event on YouTube