I am really excited about the conversation I had with Tara Isabella Burton – who is a novelist, essayist and scholar of religion and spirituality – and we spoke about her new book, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, published by Public Affairs. Tara takes us on a historical tour of the evolution of self-making, that is, how our notions individuality and self-identity formed in response to dramatic social and economic upheavals. Our conversation begins with the Renaissance – and we cover a lot of historical ground, from the aristocratic strands of self-creation during the European Enlightenment -- all the way to our current selfie obsessed and social media influencer culture. Her book is really jammed packed with novel insights and revelations that trace this inward turn to our search for authenticity and how we have come to relocate the source of divinity in our own egoic desires – where our own desires become the source and arbiter of truth and reality.  It really is a far-reaching conversation about the crisis of reality in Western culture and the prognosis is, honestly, not good.

Tara received a doctorate in theology from Trinity college, Oxford, where she was a Clarendon scholar in 2017.

Her first nonfiction book was Strange Rights: New Religions for a Godless World, also published by Public Affairs.

She really has been quite prolific. She has published essays in such outlets as the New York Times, The Atlantic, Current Affairs, Literary Hub, Vox, The Plough and many, many more.