Day 631 stands for the number of consecutive days I have walked 10,000 steps or more today. No worries, you have not missed 630 previous blog articles. Writing has not yet been a habit. This streak started as a physical health exercise, honestly, an emergency, after stepping on a scale during a phase of intense travel and tense work situations. But what began as damage control became a routine that improved not only my physical health, but also my mental clarity.
Walking and running gives me “clean” time. Sometimes I use it for podcasts. Sometimes, if the environment allows, I try to listen to the sound of nature. Lately, on different days, I listened to two podcasts that unexpectedly aligned. They opened my mind to something I should have understood much earlier, but only now see clearly.
One was an astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, offering a “cosmic perspective” that collapses many of our most stubborn human divisions. The other was a Presbyterian seminarian and Texas politician, James Talarico, offering a moral perspective that collapses our excuses for cruelty. What struck me is that neither of them begins with “what humanity should do.” They don’t start with commands. They start with reality and then let conclusions follow.
Tyson: Start with what is true.
Tyson’s route is scientific: he begins with the material facts of who we are. He points out that the elemental ingredients of life closely mirror the elemental ingredients of the universe. He lands the idea in language that feels almost spiritual despite being purely scientific: we are “literally composed of stardust,” and “the universe is alive within us.”
Then he tightens the lens from cosmos to biology: humans share DNA with all life on Earth “20% identical genes to a banana,” as he puts it, half-joking, fully serious. From there, he makes an observation that is both scientific and deeply human: it is disturbing how quickly we divide each other by superficial markers, skin color, religion, language, rituals and then treat those differences as justification for conflict.
He is not preaching. He is not moralizing. He is saying: look at the scale; look at the facts; look at the absurdity of pretending we are fundamentally different. And once you accept that baseline, racism becomes not only morally wrong, but scientifically unserious.
Talarico: Start with what is demanded.
Talarico comes from a different tradition, but the method is surprisingly similar. He does not describe faith primarily as “belief” in the modern intellectual sense. He notes that faith can be understood as trust, an experiential trust that love will carry you through the day, even when it looks temporarily defeated.
And then he pushes the same move Tyson makes back to fundamentals, away from slogans. He returns to the “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew 25) and its blunt logic: we are judged by feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the prisoner, not by identity, ritual, or religious branding.
We spend so much time looking for God “out there” that we miss God right next to us, in the immigrant, the poor person, the outcast, the neighbor who bears the divine image.
And that is why cruelty is not merely political. In his framing it is spiritually incoherent: “You can’t love God and hate other people… You cannot love God and abuse the immigrant… oppress the poor… bully the outcast.”
Again, he is not offering a sentimental “be nice.” He is describing a demanding worldview where the measure of faith is how we treat the least protected people in front of us.
The similarity: both start with reality, not superiority.
Tyson and Talarico are not saying the same thing, but they are doing the same kind of reasoning.
- Tyson says: we are one species, built from the same cosmic ingredients, sharing deep biological commonality.
- Talarico says: we are one moral community, and the divine shows up precisely in the neighbor we would rather ignore.
Both insist that the problem is not lack of information. It is what we choose to do with what we already know.
A short bridge: science → faith → leadership
Science gives you a baseline: shared reality. It reduces the wiggle room for myths that justify superiority. Faith, at its best, gives you a baseline: shared responsibility. It reduces the wiggle room for cruelty disguised as “policy,” “culture,” or “just the way the world works.”
Leadership is where the two meet. Leadership is the moment you stop asking, “What tribe am I in?” and start asking:
- What is true?
- What is owed?
- What is the cost of my comfort?
- Who pays for the system working in my favor?
If Tyson is right, then racism is not only immoral, but also intellectually unserious. If Talarico is right, then indifference is not only unfortunate, but also a daily failure of love. And if both are right, then the leadership test of our time is simple to state, hard to live:
Can we build systems, in business, politics, and community, which treat human dignity as non-negotiable, not as a slogan?
And it’s exactly the kind of thought that tends to arrive, uninvited, somewhere around step 8,000. And when these conversations show up in daily life, during my travels, or with people who see things differently, I want to meet them with courage and clarity. Not because I enjoy conflict, but because avoiding the conversation is one of the ways the worst instincts quietly win.
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