How to Find Yourself: Why Looking Inward Is Not the Answer

In the 21st-century West, identity is everything. Never has it been more important, culturally speaking, to know who you are and be true to yourself. Expressive individualism—the belief that looking inward is the way to find yourself—has become the primary approach to identity formation, and questioning anyone’s “self-made self” is often considered a threat or attack. Prompted by his own crisis of identity, Brian Rosner argues that personal identity is formed not only by looking inward, but also by looking around to your relationships, backward and forward to your life stories, and upward to God. In How to Find Yourself, Rosner equips readers to engage sympathetically with some of the most pressing questions of our day. Challenging the status quo, he offers an approach to identity formation that leads to more secure and joyful self-knowledge: being known intimately and personally by God and following the script of Jesus’s life story.

Publisher: Crossway
Type: Paperback
ISBN: 9781433578151

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Brian Rosner (PhD, Cambridge) is principal of Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia. He previously taught at the University of Aberdeen and Moore Theological College. Rosner is the author or editor of over a dozen books, including Known by God: A Biblical Theology of Personal Identity. He is married to Natalie and has four children.

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“What a solid and needed book! How to Find Yourself is about locating yourself not in the privatized world of your own self-constructed identity but in the social and divine contexts in which people live, made as they are in the image of God. In a modern world filled with loneliness and dislocation, this book connects you with life as it was designed to be lived with others. It sees life in the world for the challenge it often is, including the faults of what we do to one another, but it does not hide from the responsibility we all have for making it that way and from the opportunity that a connection to God and care for others has for making it better.” Darrell L. Bock, Executive Director of Cultural Engagement, The Hendricks Center, Dallas Theological Seminary