On the Periphery: What Science and Medicine Cannot Reach

What is a human being? The opening of Genesis is a quiet rebuke to contemporary anthropology. The first deficit in the human story is loneliness. “It is not good for the man to be alone,” the text declares — and the corrective is not interior fortification but relationship. The modern thesis that maturity consists in autonomy and independence has pragmatic value and no anthropological truth. We were not designed to be self-contained.

The man is formed of dust, animated only when the Divine breath enters him; only then does he become a living soul. Ninety-six percent of the human organism is continuous with the animal kingdom; medicine is first tested on animal models. The remaining percent is what our institutions are least equipped to address: the Godliness within the person. Medicine cannot reach it. Policy cannot legislate it.

This is the conviction that shapes my work as the Spiritual Leader of the Shiviti movement, which we cultivate in San Diego and around the world. Every community has a center and a periphery. The center is well-tended. The periphery is harder — those not quite in and not quite out, whose suffering is silent because their place is uncertain, are those whom institutions are most likely to lose. They are also those whom a serious theology of the human person is best equipped to find.