We Are the Same Thing
Redemption Stories for a Divided Moment
This past week offered an unusual convergence.
On Wednesday evening, as the sun set over Cape Canaveral and millions of Jewish families around the world gathered to begin their Passover Seder — retelling the ancient story of liberation from slavery — a rocket lifted off the Florida coast carrying four astronauts toward the moon. And today, as billions of Christians observe Easter and its promise that deliverance is possible even from death itself, those same astronauts are rounding the far side of the moon, farther from Earth than any human has ever travelled.
Passover. Easter. Artemis II. Three redemption stories, unfolding simultaneously.
I've been sitting with that coincidence all week.
Psychologists who study narrative tell us that redemption stories — stories that move from suffering to triumph, from bondage to freedom, from darkness toward light — are among the most powerful frameworks human beings use to make sense of their lives. People who tell redemption stories about their own experiences show lower rates of depression and greater satisfaction with their lives. Recovering alcoholics who frame sobriety as a personal victory are significantly more likely to maintain it. The story we tell about our struggle shapes whether we survive it.
Every major religious tradition carries versions of this arc. Islam's Hijrah. Hinduism's moksha. The Exodus. The Resurrection. These aren't just theological claims — they are, at their core, deeply human ones. They say: things can get better. Suffering is not the final word. A new world is possible.
It's a feeling many people seem to share right now — a kind of exhaustion with the relentlessness of it all. As theologian Esau McCaulley observes, the crises come in such quick succession, like waves endlessly pounding the psyche, and something instinctive in us wants to believe there is something more powerful than political and economic power alone.
What struck me most this week, though, wasn't the religious observances — profound as they are. It was an Easter message delivered from zero gravity.
Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut to travel on a lunar mission, looked back at Earth from the emptiness of space and said: "In all of this emptiness — this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe — you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together. This is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing and that we've got to get through this together."
We are the same thing.
From that distance — with no national borders visible, no political parties, no us-and-them — the only story that makes sense is a human one.
That is the story The Human Dignity Project is trying to tell. Not a story where one group wins and another loses. Not a story where my freedom requires your diminishment. McCaulley articulates it well: "A liberative story offers freedom for everybody. It offers the transformation of the person and the society, not just 'we can win, everybody else will lose.'"
That's the story Passover tells at its most universal. That's the story Easter tells at its most generous. And it's the story those four astronauts — American and Canadian, of different races and backgrounds — are embodying right now as they travel together around the moon.
Human dignity isn't a partisan position. It isn't a prize for the winning side.
It is, if we let it be, a redemption story — one big enough for all of us.
Inspired by "Believing: Easter, Passover, and Artemis II" by Lauren Jackson, The New York Times, April 5, 2026. Read the original article
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