How are we to make sense of our culture's current attitudes towards identity and sexuality? How did we get to this point? Oren and Dave begin a new series on identity and sexuality and trace the root of our modern views back nearly 400 years. Each episode will explore different philosophies and psychologies that led us to where we are today.
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Full Show Notes:
- New 4 episode series on identity and sexuality
- Walk through Carl Trueman’s book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
- Why this topic?
- “Why does the sentence, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” make sense not simply to those who have sat in poststructuralist and queer-theory seminars but to my neighbors, to people on the street, to coworkers who have no particular political ax to grind…”
- How does this go from absurd to accepted?
- The social imaginary
- The way people think about the world, how they imagine it to be, how they act intuitively in relation to it.
- A set of intuitions and practices.
- Do we live in a world with a given order and given purpose or one that is strictly material where purpose can be defined by the individual?
- What are the implications?
- Expressive individualism
- The idea that each of us finds our meaning by giving expression to our own feelings and desires.
- These expressions are my true, authentic identity
- “If the inner psychological life of the individual is sovereign, then identity becomes as potentially unlimited as the human imagination.”
- Two important questions
- Why is it important that identity is publicly acknowledged?
- Why is it that the public acknowledgment of some identities is compulsory and of others is forbidden?
Over the next few weeks, we’ll seek to provide answers and give a background for how these identities and views of sexuality emerged.
