The outcome of a three-year research project on property and wealth, this book provides many insights into the morality of having in a culture of material excess. Patrick Miller's essay on the Ten Commandments provides a powerful reading of the eighth – ‘Thou shalt not steal’ – which argues that it was first and foremost a commandment about not enslaving fellow Israelites, or in other words about the kinds of things Israelites ought and ought not to have: they were not to have one another. In a fine essay on Chrysostom Margaret Mitchell reviews his prophetic critique of luxuriant wealth, while Jean Elshtain affirms that, since their bodies do not belong to them but to God, Christians ought to reject the project of self-possession advanced by technologies which promise to perfect and prolong human life. And Christine Hinze suggests that prolonged familiarity with modern conveniences undermines human character and is at the heart of the modern obsession with acquiring too much stuff. She also gives a name to the ordering theme to many of these essays, which is the dynamics of desire.

Augustine is the theologian to whom most of these essayists turn in their critique of a culture of greed and excess, for, as Charles Mathewes argues, his theological accounts of use and misuse of the world provide powerful insights into the psychological disorder that idolatrous loves produce. William Schweiker draws on classical sociological insight in further elaborating an Augustinian approach to the problem of consumer excess: he memorably and insightfully defines the greedy person as one who ‘wants to possess all of a culture's highest riches and thus, implicitly, to have her or his desires absorbed into and defined by the society's value system’ (p. 256). In this perspective covetousness disorders the soul because it subjects the individual to a good lower than God, as Aquinas argued, and it leads ultimately to a loss of self and of identity as the individual's desires are subsumed into cravings for socially defined wealth. The paradox is that this over-identification with social power in a consumer society leads not to greater communal engagement but to the isolation of the self as greed erodes social bonds.

Günter Thomas suggests that Christians need a regeneration of their attentive powers so that their awareness can be redirected towards that which is truly life giving, and that worshipping communities should play a central role in this regeneration. Deirdre McClosskey puts in a defence of capitalism, arguing that the problem with modern economics is not its success in making people wealthy but rather its failure to attend to fairness, and to God. But Katherine Tanner in a powerful concluding essay suggests that there are basic conceptual problems in modern economics which only a theological critique can properly resolve. Against the foundational concept of property elaborated by John Locke she notes the proposal of John Milbank and others for a recovery of economic exchange as gift exchange wherein market behaviours are reconnected with social networks and relationships. However, Tanner suggests that the proper model for gift exchange is not Marcel Mauss's anthropological one but the divine Trinity. God as Trinity exchanges God's being with Godself, and, in the incarnation and the gift of the spirit, with human beings, and this suggests a mode of being and of having which eschews exclusive possession and competitive relations. Non-exclusive possession and shared rights of use are the theological ways out of the modern cultural obsessions with private property and consumption.

Accessible to preachers and pastors as well as to students and scholars the authors of this attractively produced volume have produced a fine resource which provides not only strong critique but theologically rich alternatives to the materialism of late modernity. The principal lacuna is the lack of attention paid to the many different traditions of Christian mysticism and contemplation which provide powerful resources for turning desires for having into love of being. And alongside this fairly serious failing the book has another: despite a fine array of bibliographical commentary it lacks an index, which reduces its value as a scholarly resource.