Interesting quote

I just picked up Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination. My brother got this for me for Christmas but I've neglected my reading for a while so I'm just now getting to this one. I just read this in the Preface to the Revised Edition and had to share.

To place this quote in some context Brueggeman had previously discussed William T Cavanaugh's reflection on Lawrence Thornton's novel Imagining Argentina and the novel's "odd claim that the Eucharist is the key to Christian resistance to torture."

Here's what I wanted to share:

"(C)learly the need for Eucharistic imagination in the United States is very different from the need for it in the abusive contexts that prevailed in Argentina and Chile. Indeed, the difference is so great that one might judge there is no transfer of the power of imagination from one context to the other. Whereas the South American societies suffer torture and the physical abuse, the cultural situation in the United States, satiated by consumer goods and propelled by electronic technology, is one of narcotized insensibility to human reality. It may be, however, that torture and consumer satiation perform the same negative function: to deny a lively, communal imagination that resists a mindless humanity of despairing conformity."