Support for On Being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world.

Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding principle and animating force for our lives,

a powerful love that helps us live in sacred relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world.

Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.

It took me a while to put a name to the rare quality that is palpable in Jean-Vanier's life and presence.

It's a wisdom of tenderness.

He's a philosopher and a Catholic social innovator, and simply one of the great elders in our world today.

The Larsh movement which he founded centers around people with mental disabilities.

He has devoted his life to the practical application of Christianity's most paradoxical teachings,

that there's power and humility, strength and weakness, and light in the darkness of human existence.

The 149 Larsh communities in 38 countries have become places of pilgrimage, transformative for those involved, and for the world around them.

It's the realization of how to create a culture which is no longer a culture just of competition,

but a culture of welcoming, where tenderness, where touch is important.

And it's not neither sexualized nor aggressive. It has become human.

And I think that this is what people with disabilities are teaching us.

It's something about what it means to be human and to relate and to celebrate life together.

I'm Christa Tippett, and this is on Being.

John Vignet grew up during World War II, the son of a prominent French Canadian statesman.

He still lives in the original Larsh community in Trustley-Broy France.

I sat with him in Maryland in 2007, while he was leading a retreat for college students.

The story of Larsh, which is French for the Arc, began in 1964.

John Vignet was a professor of philosophy at St. Michael's College in Toronto.

...