From Paul E. Miller’s A Loving Life In a World of Broken Relationships:

As our culture loses its Christian moorings and searches for new myths, for new ways of making sense of life, it is lurching back to the world of paganism–the world before Christianity–where “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judg. 21:25). That quote describes the time of the judges, which is the setting of the book of Ruth. Ruth begins with, “In the days when judges ruled…” (Ruth 1:1). A modern paraphrase for our culture might be, “In the days of Oprah when feelings ruled…” Oprah has an amazing ability to empathize with people, but she, along with most of our cultural elite, channels nineteenth-century thinkers like Emerson and Thoreau who made feelings and self-actualization absolute. “How I feel” or “my happiness” is the new standard.