Autosanctity in the Age of Hegemonospheres

Autosanctity in the Age of Hegemonospheres is part of the Spirituality and Society series, which explores how Christian spirituality shapes our inner life and inspires us to live with courageous public faith. In this volume, the exhausted self meets the God who offers rest. The book names a cultural condition that pervades our age: the relocation of the sacred from the transcendent God to the immanent self, which now bears the full weight of grounding meaning, morality, and identity. And it extends an invitation to lay down the burden.

First shared with readers of Graham's Substack, Spirituality and Society with Hilly, these chapters explore the liturgies of self-construction, the digital anti-desert that fills every silence, the fracturing of global order into rival hegemonospheres, the fall of celebrity leaders, suffering that resists explanation, and the theological challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Along the way, the Tech Sabbath recovers ancient wisdom for a distracted age; housing becomes a site of spiritual formation; moral complexity resists tribal certainty; and the Incarnation announces that identity can be received as gift rather than achieved through endless performance.

This is a summons to stop performing and start resting: to receive an identity you did not construct, to find worth that doesn't depend on recognition, to discover that you were held all along. It invites readers to step off the treadmill of self-creation and into the freedom of creaturehood, so the weary soul might find what it could never give itself: belonging, meaning, and home in the arms of the One who made it.

Features of this Book

• Naming autosanctity: the sacralization of self in a secular age
• Rest for the exhausted, performing self
• Faith amid hegemonospheres and fractured loyalties
• Incarnation as the answer to the burden of self-construction