Are you looking for a place to write? Do you care about the topics of Authenticity, Personal Identity, Mass Society, Freedom, Faith, and Community? If you are a new writer looking for exposure, please feel free to write for Ideals and Identities. Other topics will be considered as well. Our site will, beginning August 1, … Continue reading Invitation to Guest Authors
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Announcement of changes to idealsandidentities.com
A humble individual may be wrong but he must also feel bad about it. Even if one doesn’t feel bad about being wrong there is often real or imagined pressure to virtue signal; I may not feel bad that I was wrong, but I have to apologize as if I did.
Without that inner circle of significant others, we're left with shallowness and a void: we're “known of,” but never truly known, even to ourselves.
A person who thinks of herself secretly as a completely autonomous self, with unlimited possibilities (for this concept is what society teaches), finds herself in an impossible situation.
If ... the function of organized religion turns out to be nothing more than to house justification, and canonize, the routines of mass society; if organized religion abdicates its mission to disturb individuals in the depths of their consciences, and seeks instead simply to “make converts” that will smilingly adjust to the status quo, then it deserves the most serious and uncompromising criticism.
Instead of obeying the Word and Spirit of God, the body of those who love one another precisely insofar as they have been freed from facticity and routine, the orderliness of objective mass society, one surrenders at the same time one’s human and one’s religious integrity.
As we saw from Part 1 in this series of posts (which I encourage you to read before going on), our current systems of knowledge and power are not so much concerned with the authentic identity of concrete persons (you and I). Those systems are primarily concerned with objects of study including such commonplace perspectives … Continue reading Authenticity Under Threat, Part 2: Alienation or Being Lost in Mass Society
Prefatory remark - This message, and the one that follows it, were preached at Fellowship Christian Reformed Church in Edmonton, on February 11th and 18th respectively. This first installment of the two messages came as the closing message on Faith-based on the characters mentioned in Hebrews 11. The second installment introduces an agreed Lenten focus … Continue reading Heroes of Faith: The Story of Jephthah
To go outside on a cold winter day, to avoid fast food, to step out of the grey, is to step beyond the tribe, the nation, the throng. It is the listening to geese, squawking a song. Can't go to church, can't go to school,No putting on uniforms, nor dodging the fool. The virus has … Continue reading Belonging
Raymond Klassen - Ideals and Identities 