Today’s Wall Street Journal has a good op-ed piece by Thomas Frank, “Wall Street Mocked American Values.”

Frank talks about the demise of niche periodicals devoted to helping the really rich figure out how to spend their money “properly, conspicuously, flamboyantly.”

Reading Frank’s piece theologically, one can hear echoes of Augustine, speaking about God: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

Consumption, even in the extreme, can only provide distraction, not delight.

Frank writes:

One does not get the sense that its trader readers aspired to live this way because they were jolly bon vivants. Quite the opposite. At one point it its intermittent pursuit of the best possible record player, for example, Trader Monthly described what it claimed to be a $300,000 turntable as “a huge middle finger to everyone who enters your home.”

If you didn’t understand why someone would want to greet their guests…

In his occasional New York Times blog, Stanley Fish makes the brilliant analogy between Roland Burris’ appointment to the Senate and Saint Augustine’s role in the Donatist controversy. Fish’s central question is critical, not only for the case of Roland Burris but for the many acts that constitute our public life: Does “the lawfulness of an official action…depend on the purity of the person who performs it”?

On first thought, it might be very tempting to answer “yes.” But as Fish (and St. Augustine before him) quickly point out, that would undermine nearly every facet of public life and action. Just one example: “Is your marriage invalidated because the clerk or cleric who performed it cheated on his wife or stole from the poor box?”

Which takes us back to St. Augustine. In Fish’s words:

This last question is not new. It was debated in the 4th and 5th centuries in the context of what…