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The Waymakers · Messages · 17 min
Sharing what is coming, so that the word may keep flowing and the community keep growing.
Dear readers,
In my recent post, Fifteen Weeks of Silence, I announced a roadmap setting out the prospects for the development of Dialogues of the New World over the coming months. That is indeed the purpose of this article, but I would also like it to be an occasion to clarify the framework and the stakes of a publication that has never ceased to evolve and to search for itself since December 2025. This clarification seems to me necessary after these long weeks of interruption.
An unsparing rereading
This summer, while I was enjoying the silence and the meditative atmosphere of Bricquebec Abbey in order to examine the work accomplished during the first half of the year, the gap between what I had wished to achieve with these Dialogues and what I had actually produced forced itself upon me. I had just reread several of my older articles, striving to put myself in your place, to read them as if they were by another author. Decidedly, I was not satisfied: clumsiness, longueurs, and a dryness that I had not perceived as I wrote them.
In this publication, as I told you in my post, I have written, first in French, the equivalent of three books of about three hundred and fifty pages each in paperback format, to which must be added their translation for the English version. Despite this considerable labour, I have not yet found the tone or the stylistic approach that truly suits Dialogues of the New World. At times I wrote texts that resemble university essays more than pages inhabited by my experience of the notions I transmit. At other times, my reticence, and the conviction that speaking of oneself is a form of vanity, led me to temper what might have been more personal.
I have long practised a poetic kind of writing, in which images and rhythms suggest without disclosing, leaving the reader free to inhabit the text in his own way. I worked for several years as a journalist on a regional daily and, more recently, I trained myself in a kind of writing that I would call, as the case may be, educational or promotional, when it was a matter of formalising my therapeutic approach on a website or in thematic articles. In these Dialogues, what I must do is invent something else, and I hope to find gradually, in the texts to come, a balance between my wish to transmit ideas and my desire to clothe them in my presence and my experience. I thank in passing those kindly readers whose remarks placed me before the necessity of holding together two complementary demands: the exhaustiveness and clarity of thought, and the embodiment, in the text, of a living and sensitive presence.
Spirituality & civilisation
As for the editorial line, it is clear to me, but I have perhaps never formulated it sharply enough for you to know precisely where I speak from and why. In seeking to sum up what is at stake in this publication, two words imposed themselves: ‘spirituality’ and ‘civilisation’. You may have noticed that I recently added them after the title. Their use, for words of such profound scope, implies no pretension on my part; it aims simply to be understood at once by my readership. The full title now gives the keys to its reading: I write to trace the horizon of a possible future, a New World, grounded in the conviction that there can be no civilisation without spirituality. This civilisational renewal seems to me indispensable if we are to come through the profound crises facing humanity, and it can come about, in my view, only through the method of dialogue.
Not to dialogue in order to go round in circles, with nothing new taking flesh, but to dialogue with oneself, with texts, with society and with others, so as to leave behind the world of obedience and verticality, whose social and political consequences are a hierarchisation of beings and the price paid by all for the follies of a few, and to enter a world of complementarity and of the sharing of talents. A world whose meaning no longer rests on conformity to models carried by a political or religious elite, but on the shared construction of the common good, through individual efforts of ethical betterment and through the realisation of our essential spiritual identity.
A pivotal period
I write with the certainty of living through a pivotal period in the history of humanity, full of risks and challenges, but also of awakenings and of opportunities for unprecedented evolution. On the one hand looms the danger of tipping into a terrifying world, where the commodification of the living would become the definitive rule, where authoritarian regimes and identitarian withdrawals would multiply, where the human being would be reduced to a producer-consumer under tutelage, his horizon bounded by narrowly materialist conceptions, and where we would end by losing what grounds our dignity, letting die within us the last embers of that ‘Fire’ which is ‘son of heaven through the body of earth’, as the Rig Veda so poetically affirms (mandala 3, hymn 25, verse 1). On the other hand, if we draw lucidly the lessons of the past and awaken our spiritual identity so as to learn to live conscious, free and loving, knowing that there is no saviour but each one of us, then we can hasten the advent of a New World, at last worthy of our most sublime potentials and preserved from our atavistic tendencies to selfishness, violence and predation.
Two signals from France
And it is, I believe, in this second direction that the aspirations of a great many of our contemporaries are turning. Consider, for example, two events that have occurred recently in France, the second of which is still continuing as I write these lines, and which persuade me that the time of a spiritual and societal revolution, of a civilisational refoundation, is advancing. I mean the apostolic visit of Pope Leo XIV, from 25 to 28 September 2026, and the mobilisation of secondary-school and university students that has been stirring the country since mid-September.
The Pope’s journey gathered considerable crowds: more than a million people in Paris over his first two days, according to the media present on the spot, and some 800,000 on the Place de la Concorde for the Saturday Mass. This fervour passed off without major disorder. A study by the Verian Institute for La Croix and RTL finds that only about half of this crowd consisted of practising Catholics, the other half comprising, in equal parts, people from historically Catholic families who no longer declare any practice, and people of other religions or of none. The study further indicates that half of the French saw in the figure of the sovereign pontiff above all a moral reference and a spokesman for the forgotten, on account of his humanist positions on world peace, poverty and the ethics of artificial intelligence. Beyond the act of faith, many participants no doubt sought first of all a moment of peace, unity and peaceful celebration, in a context of social tension and anxiety about the future, regardless of their religious convictions. By contrast, Paris Saint-Germain’s victory in the Champions League final, on 30 May 2026, was accompanied by violence, damage to property and clashes with the police, in Paris and some fifteen towns. The Interior Minister reported more than 890 arrests over the weekend, stressing however that the celebration had passed off peacefully for the great majority of supporters, and that the excesses were the work of a minority only.
The mobilisation of secondary-school and university students shows, for its part, that the rising generations no longer wish to settle for a future closed off by the crises that are announced to them, political, economic, climatic, demographic, sanitary, and whose gravity they already gauge. Born in mid-September in the Paris region, it has spread across a large part of the country, and lycées as well as institutions of higher education have been blocked or closed on several occasions. Starting from concrete facts and dissatisfactions, it quickly widened to broader expectations concerning the meaning of existence and the future of societies. Observers of the movement stress that it carries stakes deeper than its immediate demands: a desire to break with a model of society perceived as running out of steam. It questions first of all the very meaning of education, and challenges the productivist and meritocratic model. These young people refuse to let school serve merely to sift candidates for the labour market, and demand a space of intellectual and human emancipation. For them the ecological emergency is a cultural bedrock, a requirement for the survival and the future organisation of their existence, which implies a structural adaptation of ways of life and of public infrastructure. They also express a quest for ‘existential density’ in the face of the virtual, a will to win back real social bonds, to reinvent collective spaces of solidarity, speech and direct political confrontation, and a need to re-enchant everyday life. Lastly, they demand a real defence of equality of opportunity and of human dignity, bringing to light the territorial and social fractures that feed their sense of abandonment.
We should be proud of this youth that is drawing a collective horizon, admittedly blurred and shifting, but which bears witness to its awareness that another world is possible and desirable. And I personally feel ashamed to see, as during the Yellow Vests movement, that the excesses of a minority of ‘black blocs’ seem able to justify, in the government’s eyes, the repression now falling upon these adolescents. The trade unions and the Syndicat des avocats de France (the lawyers’ union) denounce disproportionate reactions; the Interior Minister states on the contrary that the interventions were carried out with the utmost proportionality. As of 5 October, more than six thousand people had been arrested since the start of the movement, a great majority of them minors, and more than two hundred pupils had been injured. A student had his hand torn off at Lens. These injuries and arrests will leave their mark, and I fear that those in power are not, once again, equal to the future they have to honour.
A summons
Our age seems to me one of summons. It is now a matter of assuming our individual responsibility before the future of the world, each at his own level, with his talents and his possibilities, taking as his horizon the importance of his own ethical betterment in the improvement of the common good. Each of us is a living cell of the immense body of humanity, a unique cell whose every thought, every word and every action counts in the health of the whole. Millennia of capture of spiritual and temporal powers by a minority have accustomed us to believe that the collective destiny could rest only upon it, and that we would be called only to put into practice its precious wisdom. That this minority may indeed, at certain periods of history, have been benevolent and not merely governing has not sufficed to give human beings back full mastery of their destiny. Yet if we wish to come through the crises and to refound a world in which each finds his rightful place, it is indispensable that the greatest number recover their inner freedom and develop their spiritual sovereignty, in order patiently to build a new civilisation, borne by a free spirituality, released from dogmas and from powers, anchored in the effective ethical betterment of the human being, which allows another approach to the other, open to dialogue and to the co-construction of a new way of living together. This slow process of reconstruction will have to elaborate new political forms, in which collective choices will genuinely emanate from the peoples, and not from occasional pseudo-consultations, which justify the capture of powers by a minority. It is in this sense that I speak of Spirituality and Civilisation.
Restoring dialogue to its place
This is also why the word Dialogues, in the title of this publication, seems to me so important. One has only to observe public debate to see how often the other becomes an adversary to be reduced. Yet there is a fundamental difference between dialogue and altercation. On the one side, the words exchanged spring from a shared will to emerge enriched from the encounter; on the other, the aim is not to listen to the other, to hear him only in order to speak louder and more cleverly, and to gain the upper hand over him. The consequences are not the same: dialogue plants a tree destined to bear fruit, altercation organises scorched earth so that nothing may grow there. In this regard, the Hebraist that I am was once struck to find that the word siah (שִׂיחַ), which in Hebrew denotes the shrub, has the same root as the word sihah (שִׂיחָה), which denotes conversation, and that the latter retains, in the Psalms, the sense of meditation. Genesis (2:5) tells us that ‘no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb was growing, for the Eternal had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and He had not yet created a human being to till it’ (my own translation). Might one not read: ‘No dialogue yet rose upon the earth of possibilities, for the Wholly Other had not yet imbued it with Life, and He had not yet created human beings to release its fertile riches’? I think also of that verse of the Qur’an (49:13) which says: ‘We have made you nations and tribes, so that you may know one another.’ Marvellous words, which found our responsibility, our dignity and our singular place, and which widen the scope of the word dialogue as I understand it here.
To make this publication a place of dialogue is to accept that frail and timid saplings will rise first, that we may water them patiently, so that they grow strong and flourish until they shelter women and men from the scorching of time, and that birdsong may crown them, thus reconciling some of my human sisters and brothers with hope and with heaven.
The tipping point
Some of you will no doubt find me too lyrical, foolishly utopian, or quite simply adolescent. I must confess: the mature man that I am, who is sixty-seven years old, would doubtless do no dishonour to the ardent adolescent I once was, and none of whose hopes he has disowned. He has merely a hide somewhat more weathered by experience and by the trials of existence, but he knows, as he already knew at the dawn of his life, that only utopias carry enough life and prophetic force to change the orientation of the world. He knows also that, in experiments conducted by Damon Centola and published in 2018 in Science, a committed minority of about a quarter of the participants sufficed, in a game of linguistic convention, to overturn the established norm. These results, which their authors judge to be context-dependent, do not yet tell us what would hold for the great questions of society, but they suggest that a tipping point is possible. Malcolm Gladwell popularised this idea in The Tipping Point (2000).
It is to this minority, whose conscious commitment doubtless still falls short of that quarter of the population, but which already approaches it through its desire for another world and its presentiment that such a world is possible, that Dialogues of the New World are addressed first of all.
What the Dialogues will become
So that this place of dialogue may take shape, the publication is now organised around two sections which form its heart. The Eternal Present gathers the long memory, the spiritual timeless, the Words of Life and the legacies that the traditions have handed down to us. The World We Cross is devoted to our own age, to its fractures and its mutations, read in the light of the spiritual, as well as to the paths of a New World yet to be invented.
I have decided, assessing as accurately as I can my present workload, to commit myself to you to one publication a week, on Sunday morning. Each of these appointments will belong to one of the two principal sections: two Sundays a month for The Eternal Present, the other two for The Traversed World. The fifth Sunday of the month, where there is one, will host different content, devoted to the other spaces of the publication, the Notebooks of life or the Waymakers.
In The Eternal Present, a podcast, The Tents of Shem, will now appear once a month, at the beginning of the month. It will be devoted to the commentated reading of the Words of Life, exploring in turn the great traditions as well as more recent texts of the twentieth century, such as Talking with Angels or The Sign, of which I have already spoken in other articles. These texts will be read according to a hermeneutics of freedom, which honours the plurality of meanings so as to move beyond conditioned readings and let these foundational texts truly meet us. The first episode will appear on Sunday 8 November. We shall begin by unfolding the multitude of readings that its title alone suggests, which will allow me to explain my approach by example. The other monthly publication in this section will deal either with a specific aspect of spiritual development, or with a critical stocktaking of the legacies handed down by the religions, examining how they were constituted from their sources.
For The Traversed World, the French presidential election of 2027, and major ballots in other countries, make a particular effort on the New World strand timely. There I shall present models of society and political organisation tried out, even if on a modest scale, in the course of history, and shall reflect on the democratic and societal developments that would facilitate the spiritual evolution of human beings and hasten the advent of a new civilisation. On Sunday 25 October I shall begin a series of articles driven by a central question: ‘What link is there between the spiritual development of persons and the manner in which a society functions and organises itself?’ This question runs in both directions: the impact of spiritual development on the organisation of living together, as much as the influence of that organisation on spiritual development. It will be a series set within the long time of history and reflection. In parallel, when I have the leisure, or when current events call for a remark, I shall publish Current Glances, tighter articles on the short time of the event, in mid-week, as an optional supplement to the Sunday publication.
In the Two Quills strand of this section, I shall multiply written exchanges with other authors. I am currently engaged in a dialogue with Hamza Abid, author of Les épistémies de soi (Epistemes of the Self), on a question arising from his recent article on Ibn Hazm and epistemological faith: ‘What place might spirituality come to occupy in the future transformations of humankind and its civilisations?’ These exchanges will give rise to irregular supplements, published at the pace of their completion, in addition to the weekly publication. I am also contacting enlightening figures for a series of video interviews, at the rate of about one every two months. These too will appear irregularly, in the Voices of the Time strand.
The Waymakers section is reserved for you. There I shall publish each month a short survey to gauge your satisfaction with the content, the presentation and the rhythm of the Dialogues, so as to improve them on the basis of your impressions. Each article, video or podcast will henceforth be linked to a discussion thread in the Chat, where I shall invite you to exchange freely among yourselves. This thread will be reserved for subscribers, free or paid, while comments will remain open to all readers. I shall remind you regularly that your written contributions may appear in this section.
As for the Notebooks of life section, it is there that I shall continue, as inspiration and the events of my life may prompt, to offer you poems, informal texts and photographs, with no obligation to publish.
Supporting the publication
One point is close to my heart: this publication needs your ‘likes’, your comments and your shares to gain visibility on Substack, which hosts it, and more broadly in a saturated digital universe, where being seen grows ever harder. This simple gesture counts for a great deal. It is one of the most precious supports you can give the Dialogues, and a concrete way of encouraging me to continue.
If you judge that this publication enriches you, be aware that the whole remains, for the time being, entirely free. You may nevertheless support me in two ways: by a one-off donation via Buy Me a Coffee, the link to which will appear in each publication, or by a paid subscription on Substack, at €6 a month or €60 a year, that is €5 a month. These forms of support open up, to date, no additional content, but they would allow me to devote more time to the publication and, in due course, to create opportunities for meetings and direct exchanges, in the Paris region or in the provinces, to share with you this common concern for a changed world.
I look forward to seeing you on Sunday 25 October for the first article of the series on the link between spiritual development and the organisation of society. Until then, I shall gladly answer your letters and comments. If you wish to share an idea, a desire to take part, or a project, do not hesitate to book a thirty-minute video conversation. It is offered free of charge, and allows us to get acquainted.
Wholeheartedly with you,
Jérôme Nathanaël
© 2026 – Dialogues of the New World — Spirituality & Civilisation
Join us
Are you discovering this publication? Are you drawn to the approach of the Dialogues, and do you wish to join the community of the Waymakers? I invite you to read the Opening page, which presents the author and the project, and then to subscribe, in the free or the paid version. You will thereby be able to communicate directly with its subscribers through the Chat, as well as to exchange with the author by email or video.