individualism on Potential

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 ...

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...

[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.

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...

Context — Community First It’s important to remember that, like many cultures in the world today, Paul’s context is community-oriented. This is often hard for Americans to truly grasp. We are focuse...

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

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 ...

Context — Community First It’s important to remember that, like many cultures in the world today, Paul’s context is community-oriented. This is often hard for Americans to truly grasp. We are focuse...

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...

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...

Individualism has never been tried.

Because American evangelicalism tends to reduce everything to a personal application, we limit the way we engage with the culture around us.

Everybody is somebody, but nobody wants to be themselves.

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...

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...

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.

I am among those who do not believe that “the percentage of people who have anxiety has always held pretty constant; rather, it’s just that today we’re more open to speaking about it.” No, I am convin...

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 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...

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.

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...

When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded work (like manhood, womanhood, politics, economics, marriage, and even equality), we tend to ignore or downplay the par...

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...

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...

Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede measured individualism and collectivism across people from fifty-three nations. He found the three most individualistic nations in the world were the United St...

“We Bokonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a [karass] by Bokonon.”

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.

We individualists generally belong to what anthropologists term low-context cultures. That means that when we communicate, we assume a low level of shared information. We therefore assume it is good c...

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...

Cultural transformation in a church or organization must go beyond interpersonal models of changing “one person at a time,” which dominates Western evangelical thinking. The goals of reconciliation ne...