Identity (1 of 4)
Series: What Does It Mean To Be Human?
Jason Dees
Genesis 1:26-31
“Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes was first published in 1605 and hasn’t been out of print since. Literary scholars have said that one of the reasons is that the book was so popular that it created a new literary genre; it was the first reality entertainment. It was fiction that interacted with reality or reality that interacted with fiction to the point where it was difficult in to tell the reporting of real events from fiction. Literary scholars have obviously analyzed the book and there is pretty much a consensus that the reason this kind of genre was such a hit in its own time was because it was a time of intellectual confusion. After all, this was 1605 this was the renaissance, a time when everything that seemed so natural was being questioned and people just didn’t know what to believe. They didn’t know what was real anymore and because of that they were drawn to this new kind of entertainment.
Today we find ourselves in a very similar time, a time of rapid cultural change, but instead of Don Quixote, people are drawn to reality TV and opinion-based cable news, things that teeter between fiction and reality. Like the Renaissance, it’s a time of intellectual confusion and things that used to be seen as right are now seen as wrong, things that used to be seen as trustworthy and stable are now seen as a joke or a show. It is an intellectual crisis, and it’s hard to know what is good and right and true.
And so, over the next 5 weeks we are going to be asking the very basic question – what does it mean to be human? We will be looking at basic human actions, desires, and identifiers – things like religion, work, sex and friendship. Today we are going to be looking at something that is at the core of all of this: identity. This question that all of us ask at one time or another: who am I?
There is actually a great scene in the movie “Forrest Gump” where J ...
Series: What Does It Mean To Be Human?
Jason Dees
Genesis 1:26-31
“Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes was first published in 1605 and hasn’t been out of print since. Literary scholars have said that one of the reasons is that the book was so popular that it created a new literary genre; it was the first reality entertainment. It was fiction that interacted with reality or reality that interacted with fiction to the point where it was difficult in to tell the reporting of real events from fiction. Literary scholars have obviously analyzed the book and there is pretty much a consensus that the reason this kind of genre was such a hit in its own time was because it was a time of intellectual confusion. After all, this was 1605 this was the renaissance, a time when everything that seemed so natural was being questioned and people just didn’t know what to believe. They didn’t know what was real anymore and because of that they were drawn to this new kind of entertainment.
Today we find ourselves in a very similar time, a time of rapid cultural change, but instead of Don Quixote, people are drawn to reality TV and opinion-based cable news, things that teeter between fiction and reality. Like the Renaissance, it’s a time of intellectual confusion and things that used to be seen as right are now seen as wrong, things that used to be seen as trustworthy and stable are now seen as a joke or a show. It is an intellectual crisis, and it’s hard to know what is good and right and true.
And so, over the next 5 weeks we are going to be asking the very basic question – what does it mean to be human? We will be looking at basic human actions, desires, and identifiers – things like religion, work, sex and friendship. Today we are going to be looking at something that is at the core of all of this: identity. This question that all of us ask at one time or another: who am I?
There is actually a great scene in the movie “Forrest Gump” where J ...
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