International

If the multitudes that arrived in midtown Manhattan last Friday - the post-Thanksgiving start to the US holiday shopping season - had resigned themselves to a Broadway darkened by striking stagehands, there was some amusement to discover that the stagehands weren't the only strikers in New York.

CONSUMERISM dominates the world's developed economies, but a revolution is rising up, with passionate pockets of dissent demanding we buy, not more, but less.

In the US, for example, the Reverend Billy is denouncing the evils of shopping and preaching the "Stop Shopping" gospel. This self-proclaimed retail evangelist from New York is shouting from the pulpit about the destruction of the local neighbourhood at the hands of voracious shopping centre developers.

Our sermon today, children, concerns a matter of great spiritual import. I’ve given it the title: “What to do if you are a likeable comedian wandering through America’s nightmare of free-ways, adverts and listless consumers in traffic jams... and you’re out there in it with a BBC audience.” Amen?