Deep Belongings: Honoring the Sacred Dimension of the Universe - Ezekiel Fugate

In Western culture, many of us have been taught that the world is a random collection of lifeless particles, entirely separate from ourselves. This worldview leads us to treat the Earth—and often each other—as mere objects, devoid of inner life or inherent value, leaving us with a sense of disconnection from the very ground beneath our feet. The consequences of this mindset are increasingly dire. But what if this narrative is fundamentally flawed? What if we are not separate from the Earth, but rather integral members of its community?

As Thomas Berry suggests, “The world is a communion of subjects.” How might our interactions with both human and non-human inhabitants of our planet change if we truly recognized their inner lives and inherent worth? What if, in acknowledging these others, we discovered a deeper, more complete version of ourselves? We aim to understand why humans engage in warfare and to explore the factors that influence its frequency and form impacts and its implications for our future.

We are ourselves a mystical quality of the Earth, a unifying principle, an integration of the various polarities of the material and the spiritual, the physical and the psychic, the natural and the artistic, the intuitive and the scientific. Thomas Berry