I’ve been re-reading Bruce Rogers-Vaughn’s brilliant book Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age. Bruce starts by re-animating “soul” as the fabric that binds every living being together. We are not autonomous individuals. We are a web of belonging. Soul is a posture, an activity, a way of existing within an entangled world where there is so much suffering circulating all around us. The soul fabric is frayed, which is why so many are feeling so much heaviness and anxiety right now.
“Whenever the response to this pain is care,” Bruce writes, “there is soul.” It is a call and response. Soul shifts our focus away from social status to a deeper solidarity with those who are exploited, neglected and abused. Soul grows when we stop cooperating with the values of the profit motive and seek communion and wholeness with others and the earth. Succeeding at the game of capitalism sucks the soul dry. Which means we must slow down and try something else.
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