What is real?

I recently received a book from Jim Eisenbraun (thanks, Jim!) entitled Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, by Rodney Clapp. I started reading it over the weekend and will be posting excerpts from it here. It doesn't lend itself well to excerpting in many cases, but I'll do what I can to make them understandable without the context of the book.

Here's the first one, just before the title page of the book, to give you a taste of it:

We mean to suggest that the conflict between the neoliberal market and the Trinitarian God is over what reality is at ‘the fundamental level. If reality is inconstant, inscrutable, with no discernible connection to justice (other than.market rules), then a neoliberal order of class warfare, diminished substan- tial freedom, de-democratization, theaters of cruelty, accel- erated environmental destruction, slum proliferation, mass incarceration, and mass deportation, at the very least, makes some sense. However, if reality is fundamentally love, mercy, and steadfast kindness, the crises of neoliberalism to which we have just pointed make no sense, and should be decried as false and, indeed, evil.—Matthew T. Eggemeier and Peter Joseph Fritz, Send Lazarus, quoted in Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, by Rodney Clapp