Afflicting the Comfortable: Exodus 90 and American spirituality

Exodus 90 is an app-based Catholic men’s program whose stated goal is to aid participants in becoming “uncommonly free.” Three pillars of prayer, asceticism, and fraternity are the framework for this pursuit of freedom; this paper uses Exodus 90 as a case study revealing trends in the contemporary understanding of these three pillars and of spiritual freedom. It will review how Exodus 90 describes and promotes its program, integrating publicly available reflections on the program and using the lens of Foucault’s taxonomy of morality to explore points of contact between asceticism, ethics and subjectivity. It argues that by making an explicit appeal to discomfort in the spiritual life, Exodus 90 proposes a solution to consumer culture’s presumption of comfort, but must do so while engaging in the marketplace which encourages the pursuit of comfort that the program is meant to diminish.