The Crisis of Modern Identity

So if you’ve been tracking with the Burning Word, we’ve tried to take the opportunity in between studies, to explore questions that are sometimes practical, sometimes pressing, always connected to the invitation to “Return to the Word and encounter God again.”

This time we wanted to try something different.

Underneath our study of the Bible, underneath our discipleship and spiritual formation, underneath our hurting, our doubts, our hopes and our beliefs is our understanding of who we are. Our identity.

Yet for most of us, identity can be a tricky thing. There’s what we post and then there’s how we live. There’s our jobs and then there’s the work we are most passionate about. There’s our friendships and families and then there are the times when we are alone. What remains consistent in all those places? Or perhaps even more importantly, where do we turn when our identity is challenged? When circumstances, or careers, or politics, or abuse, or just simply depression cause us to lose sight of who we truly are?

What is our identity?

As I’ve been pondering these questions, I wanted to use this in-between time to share some of my doctoral work and offer you a guide in the theology of St. Augustine and in his most well-known work: Confessions.

We’re therefore going to take a couple of weeks to talk about identity, what it is, why modern identity seems so difficult to grasp, why answering the question of who we are might be more influenced by some major figures in Western thought than most of us think, and what all the identity politics today have to do with Christian faith or St. Augustine.

This episode, we’re going to try to set the stage by looking at the story of Modern Identity: where it came from, and why it matters. Descarte, Rousseau, Nietzche, and Freud might not be thinkers you think often about but together, they have set the stage for the identity you’re looking for (and have set up the challenges to why that identity is so hard to grasp).

So come along for a sweeping tale that culminates in a crisis: the crisis of modern identity each of us are wrestling with today, as we begin this new series on “Augustine and the Crisis of Identity”.