On March 18th, 1958, Thomas Merton had an epiphany. Standing on the corner of a busy street in Louisville, Kentucky, Merton discovered that the barriers between himself and other people had broken down. He felt a sudden, powerful connection to the pedestrians rushing by and, through them, to the whole human race. Here’s how he wrote about the experience in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world…

At the time of his epiphany, Merton was a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani and had already become one of the 20th century’s most influential writers on religion. On that street corner, Merton’s false view of his monastic vocation, which had made him felt separate or alienated from the human race, came crashing down through a powerful experience of the beauty and goodness of the people around him.

Merton also wrote a book called No Man Is an Island. He borrowed the title from John Donne’s Meditation XVII: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” In other words, Merton realized that we are all part of the human race, and we cannot ever truly separate ourselves from other people.

That does not stop us from trying. Life in America today is increasingly a culture of separateness. It’s become cliché to list the main ways we have created barriers between ourselves and others, but that doesn’t make the list any less true. Technology allows us to create our own private world more than we ever could before; mobility and the decline of “thick relational ties” tend to make our relationships transient and superficial; the rich and well-off increasingly live in elite enclaves apart from the rest of the nation; irony is emotional armor meant to protect us from the vulnerability of intimacy. If sin, like Augustine said, is being “curved in on oneself,” then we might be in a more spiritually precarious position today than many realize.

This issue is called “Self and Other,” and one of the principles behind it is that our self is bound up with the selfhood of others. The barriers listed above are unhealthy because they prevent us from coming to the same kind of epiphany that Merton came to in Louisville. Merton had a false understanding of monasticism suppressing his sense of the interrelatedness and dependence of all things; we have Netflix.

The sense of interconnectedness has always been part of American thought in its best moments. America is often called a “city on a hill.” That phrase is a reference to the Gospel of Matthew, but the first person to apply it to America was the Puritan layman and governor John Winthrop, in his 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity.” Winthrop’s sermon was, in part, an effort to explain why God allowed some people to be rich, and others poor. The reason was that so we should rely and depend on each other.

His sermon echoes the great Christian principle that when one person in the Body of Christ suffers, everyone does. When one rejoices, everyone does. That’s not metaphorical, but a literal albeit mysterious truth about the church. Our selves are not just our selves; our selves include the selfhood of others, just as their selfhoods include us. We are a part of each other.

This issue of Fare Forward is produced in the same spirit that Winthrop wrote his sermon. Some of the pieces in it try to diagnose this problem more precisely than I do above. Pivoting off of the recent NSA revelations, Jon Askonas explores the paradox that we are both more private and isolated than ever before, but also more watched and observed than ever before, while Joseph Williams examines the mixed effect social media is having on our character.

Others try to propose solutions to the culture of separateness: Meredith Schultz recommends that we practice hospitality to soften the barriers between our home life, our private selves, and our neighbors, family, and friends, and gives concrete suggestions on how to do so. Claire Gibson and Derek Turner look at how Merton’s revelation plays out practically, one by relating how she overcome her distance from an acquitted death row inmate, the other by exploring the situation in bankrupt Detroit.

We hope you enjoy the issue, and that it serves as a tool for engagement with other people. No man is an island, and we hope that the communities and networks growing up around Fare Forward can help to connect readers to each other.