individualism on Identity

You don’t need to look far today to notice that personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. A gym near where I live advertises itself with the slogan: “Be Fit. Be Well. Be You.” A new apartment com...

A survey in 2015 found that 91 percent of adults in the United States agreed that the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself. Everything else flows from this conviction. The thinking ...

Each one of us is called to live the truth of our unrepeatable uniqueness. We are not meant to model ourselves after others, however wonderful they may be. A delightful Jewish parable makes this point...

The people I know who are the most concerned about their individuality, who probe constantly into motives, who are always turned inwards toward their own reactions, usually become less and less indivi...

We have been so soaked in the individualism of modern Western culture that we feel threatened by the idea of our primary identity being that of the family we belong to-especially when the family in qu...

When the Hebrews, recently enslaved but now free, were gathered at Sinai to begin their formation as a free people, God spoke the words that defined them over against their four centuries of slavery i...

[In expressive individualism] each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.

Everybody is somebody, but nobody wants to be themselves.

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.

This then is the individualistic view.…It means many good things: e.g. Genuine novelty; order being won, paid for; the smaller systems the truer; man [is greater than] home [is greater than] state or ...

Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after h...

It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die. ‘Nothing is more rare in any man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It is quite true. Most people are other people.

Individualism has never been tried.

Individualism at first dries up only the source of public virtues, but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all the others and is finally absorbed into egoism.

80 percent of Americans agree with the statement “an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any church or synagogue.”

The psalmist could not see himself as an individual apart from Israel. His self-identity was bound up in his participation in the community of faith.

The problem is not recognizing the importance of the individual. The problem is the glorification of the individual. When the individual self is glorified over the greater good of the community, right...

The problem with individualistic Christianity is what we call “reconciliation without memory,” an approach that ignores the wounds of the world and proclaims peace where there is no peace (see Jer 8:1...

In the twenty-seven years since the killing of President Kennedy, there has been a good deal of disturbance in the American dream. The cult of individualism, of a man's (not so often a woman's...

Our modern theology, which in many ways has ceased to be personal, i.e. centered on the Christian experience of "person," nevertheless - and maybe as a result of this - has become utterly in...

Almost every African Bantu dialect includes the saying, “I am because we are,” which is captured by the term Ubuntu. The word literally means “human-ness” and roughly translates to “human kindness.” T...

Because of the bankruptcy of the older individualism, those who are aware of the break-down often speak and argue as if individualism were itself done and over with. I do not suppose that those who re...

The digital age is about getting what we want, when we want, how we want, and as much (or as little) as we want.

Some of the inability of American Christianity to understand the corporate and social nature of culture arises from the excessive individualism entrenched in Western culture.

There is no such thing as an independent Christian.

Far too many people, especially within evangelicalism, think that the individual is all that matters, and that the corporate dimension is a distraction or diversion. Of course Christianity is deeply p...

Whether we like it or not, the moment we confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, that is, from the time we become a Christian, we are at the same time a member of the Christian church … Our membe...

That there may be some who need coercion, who if given free rein would riot in selfish pleasure like unbridled beasts, is no doubt true, but one should show precisely by the fact that one knows how to...

Tradition is a willingness to read Scripture, taking into account the ways in which it has been read in the past. It is an awareness of the communal dimension of Christian faith, which calls shallow i...

I often found myself preferring the company of people outside my congregation, men and women who did not follow Jesus. Or worse, preferring the company of my sovereign self. But soon I found that my p...