283: Unabridged Interview: Belle Tindall-Riley
No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp
Outsourcing Identity in Individualist Culture
Belle Tindall-Riley argues that expressive individualism makes identity burdensome, encouraging people to outsource self-definition to media, spirituality, and consumer practices.
This is our unabridged interview with Belle Tindall-Riley.
Institutional religion is off the menu for many these days. But walk to the edge of the Glastonbury music festival, and you'll find a packed field people waiting an hour in line to buy crystals, get tarot readings, and have a sound bath from a healer with singing bowls. Our religious impulses didn’t go away. They just got transferred.
It seems, consumerism and individualism are so deeply ingrained that we now pay for membership in whatever community we subscribe to. We buy their trinkets, their supplements, and their merch as symbols of our belonging.
Dr. Belle Tindall-Riley takes the ache underneath all of that seriously. A biblical scholar who spent four years of her doctorate on a single passage, and who grew up in rural Wales lying to her classmates about going to church, she reads each practice like manifesting, tarot, crystals, WitchTok for the true longing beneath it. She examines the limits of a spirituality that always tells you you're doing just fine. You'll come away asking questions of your own spirituality: does it ever tell me no?
This is part one of The Ache: The Longing Modernity Couldn't Cure, a three-part No Small Endeavor series, recorded around the world from Oxford to the Isle of Skye, about the human ache that secularism can't explain and the new spiritualities that may not be able to fill it.
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This project was made possible through the support of a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc funder DOI 501100011730) through grant https://doi.org/10.54224/35684. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc.
Show Notes, Resources, and Transcript for abridged episode with Belle Tindall-Riley
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No Small Endeavor: An award-winning podcast that asks what it means to live a good life. Through conversations with leading thinkers across theology, philosophy, psychology, politics, and the social sciences, we explore human flourishing, meaning and purpose, faith and culture, science and religion, virtue and character, religion and spirituality, community, and the practices that help shape a good life grounded in truth, beauty, and goodness. Follow @nosmallendeavor
Host Lee C. Camp: Lee has worked as a professor of theology & ethics for more than 25 years, teaching and writing on topics of faith & politics, inter-religious dialog, and human flourishing at the intersection of theology, moral philosophy, and social sciences. Follow @leeccamp
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