Heroes for a Better World

Leonardo Boff
(1938-)

Brazilian Theologian & Human Rights Activist
1991 Right Livelihood Award Winner

birthdate: December 14
birthplace:
Concórdia, Estado de Santa Catarina, Brazil

QUOTES

Today we are in a new phase of humanity. We all are returning to our common house, the Earth: the people, the societies, the cultures and religions. Exchanging experiences and values, we enrich ourselves and we complete ourselves mutually.

The earth has arrived at the limits of its sustainability. Our task is not to create sustainable development, but a sustainable society - human beings and nature together.

"Spirituality is that attitude which puts life at the center, and defends and promotes life against all the mechanisms of death, desiccation, or stagnation. The opposite of spirit, in this sense, is not the body but death and everything associated with the system of death, understood in the widest sense of biological, social, and existential death (failure, humiliation, and oppression). Nourishing spirituality means cultivating the inward space, the basis of which all things can be brought together. It means overwhelming deadness and stagnation and living reality in terms of values, inspiration, and symbols of higher meaning. The spiritual person is one who is always in a position to see the other side of reality, and who is always capable of perceiving that profundity by which we are referred to the Ultimate Reality that religions call God.

Today social justice represents one of the most serious challenges to the conscience of the world. The abyss between those who are within the world 'order' and those who are excluded is widening day by day. The use of leading-edge technologies has made it possible to accumulate wealth in a way that is fantastic but perverse because it is unjustly distributed. Twenty-percent of humankind control eighty percent of all means of life. That fact creates a dangerous imbalance in the movement of history.

If peace is equilibrium of movement, we are living in times of grave disequilibrium of real war declared against Earth, against eco-systems which are plundered, against people who are shunted aside because word capital is no longer interested in exploiting them, against whole classes of workers who are made expendable and excluded: war against two-thirds of humankind who do not have the basic goods they need to live in peace. The world political movement does not show any equilibrium. Quite the contrary, imbalance in all areas is showing itself to be a threat to the common future of humankind and the earth.

"When a society is organized around that which is fitting in each realm, then peace, the fruit of justice, can flourish."

Solidarity, compassion, caring, communion and loving. Such values and inner powers can lay the foundation of a new paradigm of civilization, the civilization of the humanity reunited in the Common House, on the Planet Earth.... Our mission is to celebrate the greatness of Creation and connect it again to the Core where it came from and to where it will go, with care, lightness, joy, reverence and love.

 


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