Join our summer book club and read Self Made!

Starts today. See you in the comments!

Hi Three Things readers. We’re trying something new this summer — a book club to walk through one of the best books I’ve read recently: Tara Isabella Burton’s Self Made: Creating Our Identities from DaVinci to the Kardashians.

We start today with the introduction; you can read it online via the preview on Amazon (click the book cover) or Google Books (just search for the title). We’ll read a chapter a week until we get through the book. If you want to keep going, grab your own copy and join in for chapter one next week.

Need convincing? Here’s a podcast interview with the author setting up the book, plus a blurb from Russell Moore to whet your appetite:

Looking around at the strange terrain of what’s now American politics, religion, culture, and media, almost everyone is asking, ‘What happened?’ and ‘What's next?’ This book tells us the story behind those questions. Those who wonder why almost every aspect of life seems to be, at best, a reality television series and, at worst, a dark science-fiction drama will need this important work. This book will shift the conversation at perhaps just the right time.

—Russell Moore, editor in chief, Christianity Today

Let’s have a conversation of our own. See you in the comments!

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Introduction: How We Became Gods?

Three things we noticed

1. The ad campaign at the beginning is creepy (see above), but sets up the key premise: that central to modern life is the imperative to become who you want to be.

2. Burton sets up the two parallel pathways of self-shaping that have emerged in the past 500 years: the aristocratic and the democratic. The “aristocratic” self maker (usually European) needn’t be highly born, just more innately gifted than the normal person. The democratic self maker (usually American) does it all with hard work and elbow grease. The book will trace these narratives through time, showing how they are more similar than they appear and how they recently converged into a single package deal (see thing 1).

3. Many Christian treatments of the modern self tell a straightforward narrative of decline. Self Made is not a Christian book and the project here seems different. Burton wants to show how self making “has both liberated us from some forms of tyranny and placed us into the shackles of others” (p. 8). It should offer something constructive for both the pessimistic doomsayer and the convinced influencer.

Notable Quote

I believe we have not so much done away with a belief in the divine as we have relocated it. We have turned our backs on the idea of a creator-God, out there, and instead placed God within us—more specifically, within the numinous force of our own desires. Our obsession with self-creation is also an obsession with the idea that we have the power that we once believed God did: to remake ourselves and our realities, not in the image of God but in that of our own desires.

Conversation starters (pick one)

1. Was there anything in the introduction that made you sit up and say “Hmmm”? Tell us about it.

2. Are you able to see the positive and the negative aspects of self-making, or do you tend to see just one?

3. How have you experienced the liberty or tyranny of becoming your best self?

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See you next week for chapter one — “Stand Up for Bastards”.