The good folks at Liberate were kind enough to post my talk from last month’s conference this morning and what better way to illustrate the point(s) about compulsive self-presentation than to re-post it here:
Addiction / Business / Conferences / Film / Grace in Practice / Identity / Interviews / Law / Music / Poetry / Social Science / Suffering / TV / Week In Review
Another Week Ends: Randy Travis, Prayer Book Poetry, Sanford’s Tutorial, Ethical Blind Spots, Breaking Bad, Bernie, Glorious Ruin and Cville Conf Update
1. An amazing, amazing article about Randy Travis appeared on The Atlantic, trying to make sense of the country singer’s hellish year. You may know that in August he was booked for a DUI after being found naked on the side of the road (his truck in the middle of a nearby field), and then last week he was jailed following a fistfight outside a church. Writer Anthony Easton looks at Randy’s dramatic ups and downs via the two most tried and true narratives about alcoholism in country music: you’re either delivered by God or you die. Easton notes how…
America / Children / Church / Comics / Grace in Practice / Identity / Interviews / Money / Music / Relationships / Religion / Technology / TV / Week In Review
Another Week Ends: Trickle-Down Distress, Klout Scores, Playful Parenting, Glorious Ruin, Churchy Beer, Moonrise, Darnielle on Amy Grant, Blur and Louis CK
1. “Trickle-Down Distress: How America’s Broken Meritocracy Drives Our National Anxiety Epidemic” – what a title! Maura Kelly’s piece in The Atlantic functions almost as a survey of a number of the studies and articles we’ve highlighted in recent months, such the WHO reports that show America leading the world in clinical anxiety by a significant margin, and the recent piece about Having It All. In what essentially amounts to a treatise on the cruelty (and practical and psychological dead-end) of works righteousness, Kelly looks at how thorough-going the conflation of personal identity with material/career success has become in our…
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Another Week Ends: Moral Dieting, Self Illusions, Craig Sager’s Suits, Superhero Saints, LIBERATE, Prometheus, Drive-In Church, and MJ’s Bad
1. We’ve given him a rest for a few months, but the break is over! David Brooks wrote an another incisive column for The NY Times this week, “The Moral Diet,” reflecting on Dan Ariely’s new book on dishonesty. Brooks isn’t afraid to cast the research in historical-religious terms; indeed, the shift in Western self-perception, from fundamentally bad to fundamentally good, is one of his favorite subjects. But in this column he also touches on our proclivity for self-justification, questioning the unquestioned assumption that a good life is simply one where the good outweighs the bad, i.e. where the moral/political/achievement…
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