If we want to ask the question “what is going on in the world today?” in distinctively Christian fashion, we find we must undergo a crucial dislocation from our usual point of view. Most of us reflexively ask that question from the relatively parochial “we” of national identity and national purposes; a few of us, resisting that nationalist captivity, ask it instead out of a sense of “we” as citizens of the world—say, of universal values, or the U.N., or some other political imagination of that sort. But Christianity’s perspective is neither finally nationalist nor cosmopolitan. It speaks neither to citizens of this or that nation, nor to citizens of the world, but to those who would be citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Proper Christian formation challenges the way we take the division of the world into nation-states as “natural”; it helps us articulate our intuition, never fully absent, that we share with others around the world a common humanity, and that that humanity asks of us not only respect for them, but also honor for the way they manifest the glory of God in their own wondrous and fearfully made individual lives.