One Defining Feature Of Our Culture Today Is....

Toxic individualism. The phrase captures one feature of our era here in the United States: the apotheosis of individualism, or as Paul Krugman in the New York Times put it in a column last July: the cult of selfishness.

Shayna traces our current condition of individualism run amok—of individualism untethered to a higher moral order—as having arisen out of decades of erosion of respect for the dignity of people.  Systems that denigrate dignity have led to a backlash, of which toxic individualism is but one component.

Try this for a definition: toxic individualism results when the individual is separated from a higher moral order, and the individual then becomes the location for the sacred.

Our show pushes back against the unexamined, often unconscious ways that we frame public questions using political or economic modes of thinking. We aim to be part of a growing movement of people who are critical of the narrowness of political and economic categories, and who want to revive a vision of human flourishing that is grounded in the wisdoms of theological and moral philosophical tradition. We see these habits and ways of thinking as being pre-political, and foundational to a healthy and civil shared life in families, communities, economies, and polities.

In short, we want to foster conversations, develop habits, and create communities that are grounded in curiosity, going deep, and shining light.

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