Alnoor | When people ask me, "what’s the most important thing I can do," I often say to people, especially in the spiritual community: to understand how neoliberalism works. We must understand how capitalism works because it is the very oxygen in which we are breathing. It has intermediated every aspect of our lives.

"Thomas Berry is eighty years old, and he wishes to let go of the responsibilities of keeping the Center going. It is time to return to a warmer climate and the embrace of family. Yet the challenge is how to manage this with grace and a modicum of ease."

"The old story of separation that is at the core of our cultural program until now has shaped our development model’s priority: that of “having,” measured in countries’ GDP, which still prevails as the metric for assessing countries’ relative levels of development. This focus has created an imbalance, a relative inner underdevelopment, an ethical crisis that threatens our future."

The rise of the individual has been critical since Nietzsche and indeed still is, in enabling us to move beyond a traditional world governed by religion, belief, and authoritarianism. This has given us an unprecedented degree of freedom and capacity for authenticity, bringing with it essential human rights and liberal forms of social justice. But individualism as a ‘theology’ has also hollowed out the world, depriving us of a deeper meaning for being alive, leaving us to some extent alone in a hall of subjectivist mirrors. 

Humanity's archetypal detachment from Nature is now being challenged within a single generation. Our ability to operate independent of consequence is being denied.