Awakening to the Souls Among Us: Three Models of Integration with the More-Than-Human World

Abstract

Grounded in an understanding of Christ’s personhood as defined by relationship, this essay supplies three models to attune to the living quality of the more-than-human world. By drawing on St. Francis’s stance of kinship toward the created world, James Hillman’s interpretation of Plato’s anima mundi (world ensouled), and Classical Chinese Medicine’s Five Phase Element Theory, the essay develops language and imagination to overcome the habits of mind driving the “technocratic paradigm,” and to cultivate an awareness of the interconnectedness of creation.