Sacrifice and Suffering: Beyond Justice, Human Rights, and Capitalism

This essay recovers the redemptive significance of "sacrifice" as the form of Christian resistance to global capitalism. The argument unfolds by way of a comparison of sacrifice, as presented by Anselm, with one of the most compelling contemporary theological accounts of justice and human rights—that of the Latin American liberationists. After showing how the liberationists' vision is implicated in the capitalist order, I argue that Anselm's account of sacrifice displays the advent of the aneconomic order of divine charity and that it is only the recovery of life in this aneconomic mode of donation and gift that can deliver us from capitalism.