Not our own: Noble's critique of self-belonging

Cateclesia Forum has published my review of Alan Noble's You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World, which was published last year. My review is titled: Not Our Own: Noble’s Critique of Self-Belonging. An excerpt:

From social media profiles to our in-person interactions with others, we try to appear distinctive and important, while the world continues to treat us in increasingly standardizing ways. The numerous paradoxes flowing out of this constant quest for authenticity leave us perplexed and even angry at times. We want to define ourselves by ourselves, no matter the consequences for others, and yet we crave those others’ recognition of that identity. Thus, we are left feeling insecure and anxious as we seek to belong while keeping our communities at an ostensibly safe distance to protect our increasingly fragile sense of self.

Given this dark reality, it is remarkable that anyone would find self-belonging an attractive ideal. Yet our society implicitly encourages us in our quest to be our own. All inherited identities are increasingly regarded as oppressive, and the popular media celebrate the apparent nonconformist, the person who flouts traditions and communal expectations and thereby finds her true self.

So ubiquitous have such stories become in literature, theatre, and film that the notion that such heroic figures are nonconformists seems decreasingly credible. After all, as I regularly told my students, the rebel against tradition only succeeds in relocating himself in a tradition of rebellion against tradition, complete with leather jacket, black beret, and unfiltered cigarettes. Marching to a different drummer in no way eliminates the drummer; it only exacerbates the cacophony of percussive rivalries with no greater principle at stake. Lacking a proper sense of ends worth pursuing, our society is disproportionately preoccupied with means serviceable to self-ownership.

Read the entire article here.