Writing in 1938, Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned about pursuing a purely human ideal of unity. According to Bonhoeffer, visions of unity which have no reference to God are like “rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream,” and are a “hindrance... and must be banished.” He goes on to say that the distinguishing feature of a human vision of unity is idolatry: “Human love makes itself an end in itself. It creates of itself an end, an idol which it worships, to which it must subject everything. It nurses and cultivates an ideal, it loves itself, and nothing else in the world. Spiritual love, however, comes from Jesus Christ, it serves him alone; it knows that it has no immediate access to other persons” In recent years we have begun to believe that if we talk more, love more and commune more together as people, we will somehow reach an ideal state of unity. This dream is articulated in the rhetoric of world leaders. President Obama used the language of unity to great e...