Authenticity, formation, and the multiverse.

Our media's current fixation on multiverse stories--collections of cinematic alternative fictional realities and dimensions such as the Marvel Universe--suggests a significant wrestling with the responsibility of self-authoring. As an expression of our individualised anxieties, we are asked to author authentic stories to legitimise our lives. Charles Taylor refers to our current era as the age of authenticity, a time in which we hold authenticity up as a key virtue, but one that is now divorced from any meaningful moral horizons. The new horizon is now authenticity itself. This in turn has fed a growing cynicism towards institutions as places of formation, presenting a challenge to the Christian school. The challenge for our institutions is to find a way to form our people in cruciform patterns that write stories by giving them up for one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]