On Christmas Eve 1968, Willam Anders and the rest of the Apollo 8 crew were orbiting the moon, the first humans to do so. From lunar orbit, the crew spotted the earth rising over the lunar horizon. On the spur of the moment, Anders took photos of our planet, photos that may have changed the world. Among them, “Earthrise.”

Some say that photo was “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken” or “the beginning of the environmental movement.” Anders himself later said, “We set out to explore the moon and instead discovered the Earth.”[1]

I wonder, then, if the Artemis photos sent back from the Artemis II mission last week might have a similar effect. I hope so.

In 1968, humans had never seen their earth like this, as a whole, from a distance. So beautiful. So fragile. So oddly small against even a miniscule framing of space’s vast expanse.

Yes, the photo may have helped catalyze a nascent environmental movement. The reason, though, goes far beyond environmentalism. People understood viscerally perhaps the single most crucial principle humans have been striving to learn: we are all connected, all in this together, woven in a single garment of destiny.

We have been, over the course of human history, poor pupils of this lesson. I wonder, as we lurch from outrage to outrage, cruelty to cruelty, swamped in a miasma of lies and fears, yearning desperately for something better: are we ready for a fresh lesson in connection?

Next week, the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing will welcome botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer as one of our plenary speakers.[2] Kimmerer’s star has risen mightily since her 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass became a bestseller in 2020, followed by her 2024 bestseller The Serviceberry. Kimmerer’s signature blending of science and indigenous wisdom clearly answers some deep longing. She celebrates the indigenous principle of reciprocity between humans and the more-than-human world. The earth gives to us, so in gratitude we give back. Based on Kimmerer’s popularity, some part of our soul recognizes: this principle is right. We need this.

I see Kimmerer’s work as one bright river in a marvelous convergence of wisdoms happening right now, at this moment in history. Science, ecology, indigenous traditions, religion, even (barely) political philosophy and economics—all converging on the same old/new idea: we are all interconnected, interdependent. We are neighbors, we are kin.

I’ve been dimly perceiving this convergence for a while in my reading and interactions, but of course I’m hardly the only one. Essayist Rebecca Solnit’s new book The Beginning Comes After the End gathers some of her recent thinking on this convergence. The book’s overall task is to survey how far we’ve come in the past 70 years. Yes, the last ten years seem like brutal regression, but it’s a backlash to cultural changes, Solnit argues, that will march forward, changes that break down the old hierarchies of race, gender, class, that bend the arc of justice, that strain ever harder toward honoring all people and all life.

In an essay Solnit posted in her newsletter Meditations in an Emergency, she explains her theory of two worldviews (Reformed people take note: one of our favorite terms!). She writes, “At the very heart of almost all our crises is a conflict between two worldviews, the worldview in which everything is connected and the worldview of isolated individualism, of social darwinism and the war of each against each. I call the latter the ideology of isolation.”

The ideology of isolation loves hierarchies, exclusions, rigid distinctions. It assumes that life is a brutal contest and the goal is to get your own, to win. The ideology of isolation ignores consequences because it refuses to acknowledge that what we do affects others and the earth. Even if it does: who cares? This is the same worldview, of course, that has recently argued (vociferously) that empathy is a sin.

The opposite worldview Solnit terms the “cosmology of interconnection.” In the essay she proposes that “the cosmology of interconnection has grown more powerful and influential over the past several decades, thanks to many forces…” She goes on to list antiracism, feminism, gay rights movements, environmental activism, universal human rights initiatives. Her book expands on the essay and goes into further detail on these movements.

One signature evidence of these two worldviews clashing, of course: what happened in Minneapolis this past winter. The forces of separation and cruelty expected to meet little resistance or to bulldoze whatever resistance occurred. They were wrong. Neighborliness, even at great personal risk, prevailed.

Intriguing, but where is religion in all this? Is religion part of this convergence, as I hopefully suggested a moment ago? On this question I refer to a recent essay by religious ethicist Liz Bucar on her Substack. Bucar analyzed Solnit’s recent New York Times interview, where, asked who would be our next hero, who would be the counterweight to the mad king and all he stands for, Solnit demurred:

“I often think one of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies over and over that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex whose superpower is the ability to inflect and endure extraordinary violence. When actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. It brings up something really beautiful that Thich Nhat Hanh said at some point before he died a few years ago, which is: the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha in Buddhist terminology is the community of practitioners.”[3]

Bucar proposes that this statement, along with the rest of Solnit’s public writing, constitutes public theology, the “most theologically rich political conversations I’ve heard in years.” Both Solnit and Bucar affirm that in order to go forward, we must also reach back to older wisdoms. Both also tend to favor Buddhism when fishing among religious traditions for wisdom (Solnit is something of a practitioner, Bucar is not). Bucar in her essay also cites principles within Judaism, Islam, liberation theology, and the Ubuntu tradition in southern Africa. In her book, Solnit considers at length the Civil Right movement in the US and Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings and speeches in particular. Thus, in both Bucar’s and Solnit’s accounts of religious contribution to this convergence of wisdom, they cite Christian participation only very selectively.  

I don’t take this as an offense. I think they’re quite right to be selective. I do take it as a challenge, though. For centuries, Christians have been obsessed with distinctions, separations, hierarchies, dominion. Some Christians still are. Christians in America especially have been all too eager to find Christian justification for that ideology of isolation, especially the economic expressions of it.

Is Christianity inherently a religion of separation? Sheep from goats, humans from nature, God from both? Certainly, we have within the Christian tradition, particularly in the prophets and in Jesus’s life and teaching, all that we need to live out the fundamental truth of interconnectedness. The great hymn of “all things” in Colossians 1 is only one example, that soaring passage in which Christ is “reconciling all things to himself.” Our fundamental interconnection, we believe, centers on Christ.

In our practice, too, we have a long tradition of loving and serving the neighbor. Solnit’s two-worldviews essay is even titled “When Love Thy Neighbor is a Cry of Resistance.” Yes, it always has been, from the time of ancient Israel to Jesus’s day to now. Elsewhere in her interview, as Solnit continues to observe how change happens through long-haul communal effort, she remarks (to many readers’ delight):

“A huge amount of important work … is done by nice ladies. And I think a lot of people with platforms, and a lot of the left, wants social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara or something like that. And so the fact that nice ladies actually change the world, maybe it’s about the fact that changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war.”

Score one for church ladies!

I don’t know how to wean Christianity off the ideology of isolation. But I think Solnit is right that caregiving—we could also call it reciprocity—based on a profound sense of kinship, this is and always has been the right direction. Christians do have a long tradition of on-the-ground service and caregiving. We distort neighborly service in a million ways, but in our best moments we faithfully follow the model of the Savior. In doing so, we live out that principle of kinship and connection.

The challenge for us in this point in history, as MLK commented, is “to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.” MLK thought Gandhi was the first person to do this.[4] I wonder what he would say today?

Could it be that large-scale living out of the love ethic is now our communal challenge, across religions, science, political and economic theory, ecology, urban planning, business, and every aspect of human endeavor? Will Christians help this fragile planet, its hapless human inhabitants, all of its abundant life perceive our interconnectedness and shape our lives and our social systems upon it? Or will we resist what Julian of Norwich perceived, long before anyone saw photos of this planet, when she held in her hand a hazelnut-sized ball and understood that all things have being only by the love of God?

[1] The Wikipedia article on the photo cites the sources for these quotations.

[2] You can still purchase tickets to the Thursday evening lecture.

[3] I’ve thought about this idea from a different angle for a long time, since I teach a course on epics. I’ve also written about it in the context of contemporary storytelling.

[4] Quoted in Solnit, The Beginning Comes After the End, p. 36.