What Brené Brown gets right about belonging and what faith says we’re missing

Alex Noel reflects on our longing for true belonging and why the places we look to often can’t hold us. Drawing on faith and lived experience, she unpacks where home is really found when everything around us keeps shifting.

Interviewed recently on Steven Bartlett’s podcast The Diary of a CEO, Brené Brown (his most requested guest ever) reflected that, of all her books, Braving the Wilderness was “the only prophetic book that I think I’ve ever written”.

Published in 2017, in it she observed that people were beginning to ‘sort’ themselves into “ideological bunkers”, forming strongholds of opinion and belief. And that while this created a strong sense of camaraderie together with ‘likeminded’ people, it also fostered an ‘us versus them’ mentality. More widely it had the power to profoundly separate people from each other through mutual distrust and animosity.