
Why the Self Became Our God | Tara Isabella Burton
Tara Isabella Burton is a novelist, theologian, and former religion correspondent for Vox. She holds a doctorate in theology from Oxford and is the author of the nonfiction books Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made, as well as three novels, most recently Here in Avalon. She is a lecturer and visiting research fellow at the Catholic University of America, where she co-directs the Can Beauty Save the World? project, and is currently writing The Great Work: How Magic Made the Modern World, an intellectual history of Western esotericism and the idea that reality is malleable. In this conversation, we explore what happens to religion when people stop trusting institutions. We discuss why so many people who say they have no religion still believe in a higher power, why the self has become the only authority many of us trust, and how traditional religion is returning as one more option in a remixed spiritual identity. Tara explains the so-called trad-tech alliance, why religion is increasingly treated as software you download to live a certain kind of life, and why she thinks we have listened to Nietzsche a little too much. We also talk about what happened to SoulCycle and wellness culture, how whole societies can become possessed by ideas, from Jung on Hitler to the strange history of the swastika in 19th-century occultism, and what it means to carry an oracle in our pocket in the age of AI. Finally, we discuss Plato’s view of philosophy as an act of love, why the Catholic Church under Pope Leo is becoming a home for AI skeptics, the three philosophers who shaped Tara’s thinking most (Kierkegaard, Plato, and Simone Weil), and whether AI can ever replace human creativity. Instagram and other platforms: https://linktr.ee/philosophy.everyday More from Philosophy Everyday: https://www.thephilosophyeveryday.com/