[ex3xu]

I think your understanding will improve if you view the content of this link as nothing but a scathing review of the book in question. I get the sense that your confusion comes from thinking that the linked article is trying to make points about the subject of the book, when really the point of nearly every paragraph is to trash the book as a waste of time especially compared to her previous book (while concomitantly recommending better options by other authors, referenced and linked throughout the review).

For instance, when the reviewer references Wikipedia, they are not making a criticism of Wikipedia's usefulness -- they are criticizing Odell's summary of other writers' ideas as being as shallowly researched as summarizing their ideas off of Wikipedia. When the reviewer states "Problems with style and pacing are problems of thinking", the primary intent is not to make some sort of generalized insight applicable to you, but instead to criticize Odell in particular as putting poorly styled, poorly paced, and poorly thought-out lines on the page. If you read the review from the perspective of this adversarial framing, you could imagine the reviewer's answer to "Why We Never Have Enough Time" to be "Because we have to waste our lives on our jobs -- mine right now being to write a review of a book I think is a waste of everyone's time."

Catechesis is a term often associated with the the Catholic Church as a form of systematic instruction of a set of dogmatic ideological beliefs. This insruction is backed by a huge and famously boring book, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Denouncing Odell's book as "catechistic indexing" uses the connotation of a group of religious followers shallowly regurgitating the same dogmatically accepted facts (with or without adequate exposition or even any understanding in the first place), in the style that a religious leader might conduct a catechistic question and answer session. The abstract forces being referenced are essentially the attention economy's post-structuralist rehash of the same Marxist criticisms of capitalism that goes back centuries at this point, which the reviewer assumes that New Yorker readers (who generally self-select for a certain demographic of left-leaning and educated) would be overly familiar with. If you're looking for a basic introduction to those arguments, there's Richard Wolff's appearance on Lex Fridman's podcast last year [0] or you could try a more erudite overview like Vivek Chibber's talk, titled Consent, Coercion, and Resignation on the structural forces of capitalism [1].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Bi-q89j5Y&t=4316s

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dcVoQbhFtQ

[FearNotDaniel]

Not to detract from your main point, or from the intended rhetoric of the featured article, but "huge and famously boring" is not really a fair description of the Catholic Catechism from the point of view of its intended audience. I have many textbooks on computer related topics, which most non-computer people would describe as both huge and boring, yet I (and no doubt many more folks here) would find them a source of endless fascination.

The Catechism is perhaps "famously" boring because of the number of people who identify as (culturally) "catholic", probably only go to Mass on Sundays because their grandmothers told them they have to and their mothers will refuse to talk to them at Sunday lunch if they don't; people who in some ways want some of the purported "privileges" of belonging to the faith (access to schools in the UK, for example) without actually being actively engaged or interested in the faith itself. To such people, occasionally being forced to plod through parts of the Catechism while jumping through various hoops in order to maintain membership, is what creates the reputation referenced here.

But to someone actually interested in the faith, what the Church teaches and why, this book is of course a fascinating (and very accessible) read. Dogmas (and doctrines) are not blindly asserted, but justified by reference to both scripture and a tradition of philosophy stretching back thousands of years. It's a nerdy read, and theology nerds will certainly get a kick out of it, but you don't need a degree in the subject to make sense of the contents.

[ex3xu]

These are fair and valid points and I wish I had used more consideration in my attempt to convey the rhetorical usage. The proselytization component is probably a more significant reason behind the word choice than any other aspect of catechesis. I meant no offense to anyone of any faith.