Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro formed the One River Foundation with Frank Levy as "a global community of spiritually independent seekers, creatives, activists, and holy rascals teaching "Perennial Wisdom" as an antidote to the tribalism, ignorance, illiberalism, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, and apocalyptic fantasies tearing our communities apart, and inhibiting the thriving of person and planet." They do this "through their One River Wisdom School in Nashville TN and their books Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent: Sacred Teachings—Annotated & Explained (2013) and The World Wisdom Bible (2017)
Richard Rohr wrote the Foreword to Rami Shapiro's 2013 book. referring to Perennial Wisdom as "collective unconscious, globalization or the One Spirit of God.
One way to summarize the essence of "perennial wisdom" is:
There is a Divine Reality underneath and inherent in the world of things;
There is in the human soul a natural capacity, similarity, and longing for this Divine Reality;
The final goal of existence is union with this Divine Reality.
Matthew Fox wrote One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing From Global Faiths in 2000. Thomas Berry notes that out of the world's spiritual literature, and "with reference to the discovery of an emergent universe by contemporary science, he has, it seems, created a new mythic context for leading us out of our contemporary religious and spiritual confusion into a new clarity of mind and peace of soul, by affirming rather than abandoning any of our traditional beliefs.”
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