Welcome
The Emergent Self is a place to think carefully about how we become who we are — through humiliation and recognition, belief and doubt, loss and meaning. I’m Robert K. Green, a writer and scholar who has spent a lifetime questioning what we’re told it means to be human. Read, disagree thoughtfully, and join the conversation.
Latest articles
In 1977, a student in my rural Georgia classroom told me he wasn't allowed in the city pool. That moment raised a question I still carry: who decided what our skin would mean, and who gains from the answer?
- Robert K. Green, Ph.D.
People build systems, and then those systems quietly build us. What the research on corporate leaders reveals about privilege, who pays the price, and why what we built we can also rebuild.
- Robert K. Green, Ph.D.
What if you are not a thing at all, but a happening? Whitehead's quiet rebellion against the grammar of nouns — and the freedom it offers.
- Robert K. Green, Ph.D.
From the blog
The person who flatters you most may be the one most likely to turn on you. A meeting I came to dread, the research behind it, and why the truth people can’t tell you goes somewhere else.
- Robert K. Green, Ph.D.
A parishioner once told me a tapestry did not belong in church because there were no White people in it. Thirty years later I have the words for what she was defending: not God, but a mascot.
- Robert K. Green, Ph.D.
Was my depression really a gift? A former priest tests his own claim that the dark years after he left the priesthood were a gift.
- Robert K. Green, Ph.D.
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