arts and culture on Anonymity

For those of us who live in the shadow of self-doubt, who may wonder what meaning a life of relative anonymity may have in a society filled with the cult of celebrity in which likes, reposts, and digi...

Until recently, most Americans didn’t know that women were pivotal to the NASA space program as far back as the 1950s. Their names and accomplishments were lost to the common history we grew up studyi...

There’s a coffee shop in Bluffton, SC named The Corner Perk. Bluffton is near Charleston. In 2012, a woman who wished to remain anonymous handed the owner a hundred-dollar bill and said she wanted to ...

Editor’s Note: This story is often told as a true story, when in fact it is probably fictitious. Nevertheless, there is a significant illustrative point: sometimes the things we fear most may in fact ...

One of the early hits of the internet had to be eBay. Suddenly getting rid of your old junk, or otherwise unnecessary “stuff,” could be sold, not just to your neighbors in a yard sale, but to anyone w...

A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which ...

Everybody is somebody, but nobody wants to be themselves.

This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone...

One of the characters in popular contemporary novelist Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom, Joey Berglund, reflects on life and identity by referring to selfhood as “a collection of contradictory potenti...

As the speed and choices of the digital age send us hurling toward impatience and shallowness, they culminate in its most damaging consequence: isolation. Social media, in particular, lures us in unde...

Epithets can chip away at the image of God in us. Name-calling and identity theft are felonious offenses against divinity and humanity. Blasphemy. Those of us who have been victims of identity theft o...

No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no o...

You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.

Busyness allows us to avoid the deepest questions of our souls. It keeps us at arm's length from our truest, most authentic selves. And when we don't know our deepest, most authentic selves, w...

The exhausting manipulation and control it takes to protect an identity based on circumstances will crush our hearts and hide the best of who we are behind a wall of insecurity.

In his wonderful book Run with Horses , Eugene Peterson reminds us of many of the ways in which modern life de-personalizes and degrades us. We become a number and not a name. We are valued for wha...

The most poignant and powerful time for me in the film 12 Years a Slave was not when the beatings took place or the general degradation meted out to the hero as a matter of course or even the general ...

To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Our true identity is to love without fear and insecurity. Our higher potential finds us when we set our course in that direction. The power of love and compassion transforms insecurity.

Individualism is a denial that life has any meaning except the gratification of the ego; in politics it must end anarchy. It is not possible for one man to be both Christian and individualist.

Digital connections . . . may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other.

A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act li...

Individualism has never been tried.

I must register a certain impatience with the faddish equation, never suggested by me, of the term identity with the question, “Who am I?” This question nobody would ask himself except in a more or le...

Looking into his life and out to the wider world, Kenneth Gergen writes about The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, arguing that “social saturation brings with it a general lo...

The simple truth of our being gets lost in the metanarratives we spin. We become the fictions we live. Consequently, our way of being in the world is so false and unnatural that our presence is thorou...

After surveying an incredibly diverse cross section of college students across America, Donna Freitas found “the most pressing social media issues students face: the importance of appearing happy”—and...

In his excellent book, Strong & Weak , Andy Crouch discusses the unique phenomenon of nakedness, something, as he will argue, no other species really experiences. “Nakedness” has, for good reas...

Why am I me?

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.