Enough: Contentment in an Age of Excess

There really hasn’t been a go to book for laity I have come by that mitigates the heady academic, environmental and communitarian theologies and philosophies of Michael Pollan or Wendell Berry for the masses.  I have read The Agrarian Reader and some of its essays come close, but they are quickly inundated by their academic nature and lengthy explanations. 
Will Samson’s book Enough: Contentment in an Age of Excess is an excellent and thoughtful primer for pilgrims on the way to agrarianism or people who are seriously questioning the meaning of "stuff."
Samson’s work is best read as a devaluation of stuff and a revalueing of goods and actions that benefit the community as a whole and not just individuals.  In writing a primer, Samson has woven together strands of thinking from Shane Claiborne, Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, economists, environmentalists, the Bible and his own life into a springboard for a journey into living counter-culturally. 
Divided into three sections, Samson outlines the destructiveness of American culture and how American Christians have been seduced, blinded, distracted, and distorted by consumerism and materialism, and even how bad theology makes us run toward consumerism with open arms.  Then, Samson finishes with suggestions and a call to action in living as a local community set apart from the consumerist culture surrounding us on all fronts.
This book, for many reasons, is a must read just to see so many diverse prophetic voices wrapped into a cohesive and concise narrative.  An added bonus is the time of its writing, in the spring of 2008.  Samson alludes to the coming financial crises as symptomatic of our consumerist culture.  This adds great weight to the overall argument of the book, as one ponders how the very warnings Samson gives are now coming true all around us.

Will Samson has also written, along with his wife, Justice in the Burbs: Being the Hands of Jesus Wherever You Live.  His website is his namesake: willsamson.com