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Something Understood

Religion & Ethics

Ethical and religious discussion that examines some of the larger questions of life

Ethical and religious discussion that examines some of the larger questions of life, taking a spiritual theme and exploring it through music, prose and poetry

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Something Understood: Image and Identity

Image and Identity

19/06/2016

BBC Radio 4 - Something Understood, Image and Identity

Priest Joanna Jepson examines the construction of image and the search for identity.

Former chaplain at the London College of Fashion Joanna Jepson examines the ways in which people seek to construct their image while searching for their true identity.

Priest and former chaplain at the London College of Fashion Joanna Jepson examines the ways in which we seek to construct our image while searching for our true identity. 

We cast our gaze back to the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve were naked and harmonious, at ease with their identities before the fall, and we explore the fallout that followed the consumption of the forbidden fruit. 

Joanna argues that, in a culture of consumerism, the market forces exploit our craving to create and recreate our images of ourselves through fashion and other material goods. She explains that "the noise of marketing strategies urge us; drive, goad, beguile and coax us to build our identity in the image of their narrow ideals of beauty, success and happiness. And all the time it pulls us out of ourselves. We are left feeling incomplete, inadequate, discontented, stuck in a cycle of exhausting comparisons. It diminishes us."

Joanna contrasts this situation with the lives of a group of contemplative nuns with whom she spent time when she was 21. She reveals that living with the nuns taught her to "come home to herself" and to learn the true meaning of the saying "beauty comes from within".

Presenter: Joanna Jepson
Producer: Max O'Brien
A TBI Media production for BBC Radio 4.

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