The demand to be authentic is so commonplace that it has lost its meaning. ‘Today, there is little premium placed on being authentic,’ writes the American philosopher Gordon Marino in his moving meditation The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age (2018). The increasing prevalence of social media constructions of ourselves, … Continue reading Performative Authenticity: Mass Society in Real Time
Category: Spirituality
"...overcoming otherness is bringing our uniqueness to a situation not originally intended to accept it, and then translating and transforming the situation so the uniqueness can feel at home. "
To be saved by grace sounds simple enough, grammatically at least. We are born into sin, and redeemed by a sacrificial love which we do not deserve. Baptized at 11, I seemed to have passed the test. Sunday school stuff, really. Let’s go to the all you can eat buffet together, laugh a little, and … Continue reading The Ways of Grace
When the detained people who stormed the Capitol are prosecuted, my guess is the charges will have something to do with sedition, destroying property, or threatening lives. Democracy will be defended, but it is this terrorism that needs to be tried.
What has been expressed as widespread mistrust is not of what is around us, such as churches, universities, stock markets, and governments; the distrust is of ourselves. We distrust who we are. And I don’t believe it.
“What about this? And what about that?” Don’t talk of nourishment; let’s eat till we’re fat. We look to a promise and give up the now, We exchange our Being for furrowed brow.
"...tending to our own resilience is a vital task for living well. But that requires not only that we don’t overlook the severity of loss or the suffering that we regularly experience, but also that we experience and embrace the suffering.”
"...depression and addiction are related phenomena, and ... they are symptoms of a more general malaise of which the world-ending consequences may be of our own doing."
I thought social media loved me for who I was, with its catered advertising and photo- and video-sharing capabilities; but really, it only loved me for the attention I gave to it.
Trumpism, Prophets of Deceit suggests, is the inevitable outcome of a social, economic, and political order that generates human needs that it cannot satisfy.
