You Are Not Your Own Substack by Alan Noble
You Are Not Your Own Substack is a weekly newsletter with short essays, notes, and extended arguments from Alan Noble, associate professor of English, author of Disruptive Witness, You Are Not Your Own, and On Getting Out of Bed, and frequent speaker on the topics of secularism, technology, culture, and Christianity.
You Are Not Your Own Substack explores the themes and issues that interest me most: tracing and revealing the often unspoken and unacknowledged forces that shape our culture, imaginations, and faith. I am especially interested in the “Social Myths” that draw our attention away from meaningful issues, distracting us with trivial drama.
You’ll also find notes from my research as I work on my next book project and expand on the work of previous books. And occasionally I’ll write about random things that strike my interest, like Strawberry Shortcake.
Most articles will reflect the influence of the scholars I have been reading, which I like to think brings some freshness to the topics I write about. For example, you will regularly find me citing Jacques Ellul, Charles Taylor, and Josef Pieper, as well as poets and novelists.
As I lay out in my launch essay, my big plan for this project is to do rich, fruitful, and hospitable cultural criticism that looks beneath the world of appearances. My operating thesis is: “Christians adapt to the Spirit of this World far, far more than they realize.”
But in order to do this project well, I do need the aid of readers who can help point me to interesting and insightful examples of cultural artifacts and incidents so that I can study them. If you would like to be a part of that community, please click below.
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You’re supporting my writing so that it won’t go away, because those are the options
I don’t mean to sound flippant with that last point, but that is the reality with this project. It can only exist insofar as I can justify the time to my family. I am excited by the project and the kind of community we are building, so I’m hopeful we’ll be able to find the support necessary to keep this going.
There are three support tiers for You Are Not Your Own Substack:
An annual $70 subscription, for those who want to save some money and time
A monthly $7 subscription, for those who need to be flexible
A Founding Member $210 a year subscription, for those who strongly believe in this project and want to see it flourish. If this is something you can afford, please consider it.
For those of you who can’t afford to support the newsletter at this time, I would still encourage you to subscribe, which you can do for free! You will miss some exclusive content, but you will still get the newsletter delivered to directly to your inbox.
If you would like to contact me about subscriptions or questions about substack, feel free to email me at oalannoble@substack.com.
