Tag: individualism

“To Thine Own Self Be True”: A Pathway to Liberation or Loneliness?

September 11, 2023

Here I explore Canadian sociologist Sam Riemer’s book Caught in the Current: British and Canadian Evangelicals in an Age of Self-Spirituality (McGill-Queens 2023). His argument is that concerns over church decline, sexual ethics, and the exit of youth from church are just the surface of our cultural sea. The underlying current that drives all the visible issues is self-spirituality, and more specifically, a shift from a locus of external authority to internal authority.  … More “To Thine Own Self Be True”: A Pathway to Liberation or Loneliness?

Scaling the Big Me and the Blessed Ambition of Moral Commitments

November 3, 2020

This is a sobering but also inspiring book about what life is really all about, and how we might re-weave the torn and fraying social fabric of modern life. Written pre-COVID, but somehow meant to address the loneliness of it: “A half century of emancipation has made individualism, which was the heaven for our grandparents, into our hell.” … More Scaling the Big Me and the Blessed Ambition of Moral Commitments