“All Humans Are Strangers—Almost Everywhere”: Reflections on Human Belonging
Published in Social Sciences, Law, Politics & International Studies, and Philosophy & Religion
In my article “All Humans Are Strangers—Almost Everywhere”: Reflections on Human Belonging, I ponder my early childhood in Africa and navigating life across countries, cultures, and faiths. Having felt like a stranger and perpetual foreigner all my life, I suggest that recognising human “strangeness” can open pathways to connection that transcend ideological divides, for in truth, everyone alive today is a stranger—almost everywhere.
My most personal article to date arose from an invited talk that was advertised to the public as follows:
Welcome to my colorful and confused world. We are five, between us we speak five languages. My wife was raised between Bolivia and Italy and spent extended periods of time in Mexico and Germany. I was raised in Sierra Leone, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia, plus extended periods of time in Singapore, United States of America (USA), Costa Rica, South Africa, Estonia, Bolivia, among others. Our most dreaded question: “Where are you from?” When we got married, we had to choose a ‘family name’ and opted for the Bolivian naming convention. It seemed to make sense—or so we thought. In hindsight, I often wonder … we now have three different last names for the categories father, mother, and children. In synthesis, we are a blend of five, multiple backgrounds, multiple cultures, multiple languages, multiple last names. Are we confused enough? Come and find out. Hear a talk where the speaker tries to explain all this to himself. His talk includes biographical and biblical reflections on longing and belonging, home and homelessness. He also draws on findings from his Ph.D. research, which was about (you guessed it)—international migration.
Writing as a self-professing “stranger” exploring my own “longing for belonging” through lived experience, my autoethnographic account serves as a mini-manifesto for an interfaith disposition. It advances a simple central proposition: in spatial and temporal terms, all humans alive today are essentially strangers—almost everywhere.
Spatially, we are strangers to the vast majority of our contemporaries, inhabiting only a small corner of the planet while billions live elsewhere. In this sense, we are strangers almost everywhere, and to almost everyone. Temporally, we are strangers because our lives are fleeting and bound by time; set against the Earth’s 4,543,000,000-year history, each human existence lasts only an instant. In this sense, we are strangers to nearly every era and to almost every generation that has ever lived—or ever will.
Recognising this dual, spatial-and-temporal, human “strangeness” fosters an ethos of intellectual hospitality—welcoming others precisely because we, too, are foreign.
Significantly, because all humans are fellow strangers—both spatially and temporally—we are inherently able to adopt a posture of love and welcome toward others, in both practical and intellectual ways. Cultivating an awareness of this universal “strangeness” opens rich possibilities for interfaith engagement. If we are strangers in time and space, then we can also welcome—and be welcomed by—other strangers. Such awareness grants the freedom to offer and receive hospitality (practically and intellectually), acting at once as guests and hosts. It also frees us from fearing other faiths or worldview orientations, enabling us instead to value in others “the irreducible, glorious dignity of difference” (Sacks, 2009, p. 42).
In today’s age of planetary-scale challenges, rising human mobility is driving deeper interdependence—making collaboration across religious and ideological divides an increasingly inescapable imperative. In this light, humanity’s future may well depend on a widely shared interfaith consciousness. In this sense, human perpetuity seems predicated on interfaith consciousness, widely shared.
My piece is dedicated to the rootless, the drifter, the lonely, the awkward, the displaced, the uprooted, and the migrant. It is written in the hope that the lived experiences I share may, in some small way, encourage and strengthen human collaboration on the pressing issues of our time—war/peace, un/sustainability, in/equity, in/sufficiency, in/equality, lack/excess, poverty/opulence, and climate chaos.
📖 The full article is freely available (Open Access) here:
Johannes M. Luetz is professor of sustainability and religion at Alphacrucis University College (AC), Brisbane, Australia, specialising in research that examines ecological concerns from spiritual perspectives. He has lived and worked across countries and continents and conducts interdisciplinary humanitarian research at the science–faith, interfaith, and science–policy interface. He is based in Brisbane and serves AC’s Graduate Research School as its Director of Graduate Research and Research Development and as the AC Chair of Research Ethics. As an interdisciplinary social scientist, Johannes has affiliations with the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney), where he is an adjunct associate professor in the School of Social Sciences, and with the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC Maroochydore), where he is an adjunct professor in the School of Law and Society. He is Deputy Editor of the International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management and serves on the editorial boards of several international academic journals.
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