“The way of peace they have not known.”

“The way of peace they have not known.”

Isaiah’s verdict feels uncomfortably current. You don’t have to look far—Gaza and Israel, Ukraine, political polarization at home, ecological breakdown—to feel the weight of those words.

On a recent episode of Created in the Image of God, I sat down with someone who’s spent his life asking whether that has to remain true.

Robert Atkinson is a developmental psychologist, a pioneer in life storytelling, and the author of The Way of Unity: Seven Essential Principles and Preconditions for Peace. During this year’s Ridván festival (April 21–May 2, 2026), his book reached #1 in Amazon’s Bahá’í category—a small but telling sign that people are hungry for a different story about where humanity is headed.

The heart of that story is both bracing and hopeful:

Peace is not automatic, but it is inevitable—if we understand where we are in our collective development and learn to live by principles designed for a globally interconnected world.

From Hiroshima to a World‑Embracing Vision

Robert’s personal story is a microcosm of the larger human story he writes about.

He was born on a day his mother never forgot. As she lay in the hospital, she heard noise in the streets: parades, people cheering, celebrations. “The day you were born,” she told him again and again, “the streets were filled with parades.”

Not for him, of course. For the end of the war—or so people thought.

Only later did he realize what else had happened that day: the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Joy and horror, relief and apocalypse, wrapped around his first breath. An ending and a beginning.

A few years later, as a nine‑year‑old, he watched his grandmother sit alone in an upstairs room, quietly reading the Bible every day. He didn’t understand the theology, but something in her devotion imprinted itself on him. It sent him, in college, into philosophy—not as an abstraction, but as a quest to understand what gave her that depth of purpose and peace.

From philosophy he moved into comparative religion and mythology. Then came another world‑shifting image: the moon landing. Like many of his generation, seeing the Earth from space—one blue sphere, no national borders—changed him. He began to sense what he now calls a “world‑embracing vision.”

He spent time with folk singers like Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, teaching a course on folk‑rock lyrics as modern myth. He met Joseph Campbell and mapped songs onto “the hero’s journey.” Somewhere along that path, on the deck of the Hudson River sloop Clearwater, he picked up a small Bahá’í pamphlet on “progressive revelation.” It explained different religions as successive chapters in one divine story.

That little brochure became a bookmark in his comparative‑religion studies, then a turning point. Eventually, he recognized in the Bahá’í teachings the very arc he’d been tracing through myth and philosophy: an unfolding revelation, guiding humanity through stages toward unity.

Fast‑forward to now: The Way of Unity, drawn from those decades of experience, climbs to #1 during Ridván, the Bahá’í festival marking Bahá’u’lláh’s declaration in 1863 of a world‑embracing message of unity.

The question is: what does this actually mean for us, here and now, in the middle of what Robert calls our “collective muddle”?

Adolescence, Threshold Guardians, and Why the Path Isn’t Straight

Isaiah says, “The way of peace they have not known.” Robert doesn’t disagree. But he adds a crucial qualifier:

We have not known the way of peace because we haven’t grown up yet.

In his view, humanity has been moving through developmental stages—not unlike an individual child, adolescent, and adult. Each stage comes with its own “core conflicts” that must be resolved before we can move on.

Two key features of this process:

1. It’s evolutionary and cumulative.
   
   The teachings of the world’s prophets—Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, Bahá’u’lláh, and others—come in sequence, each providing what humanity needs for its stage in the journey.
   
   
   
   
2. Free will makes the line crooked.
   
   We are not dragged along against our will. God endows us with freedom, which means we can resist, distort, or delay what’s being offered.
   
   
   
   

That’s why, as I suggested on the show, the serpent in Genesis can grow into the dragon of Revelation: when enough people heed the whisper of ego, fear, and greed, those inner impulses eventually scale into structures and systems that can wreak real havoc.

Robert picked up that image and added another from mythology: the gargoyle.

Serpent, dragon, gargoyle—different traditions, same function. They are what mythologists call threshold guardians: frightening figures who appear at the boundary between stages. You must face them—not necessarily destroy them, but confront what they represent—before you can cross into a new realm.

In that sense, our current global turbulence—the violence, polarization, systemic injustice, ecological crisis—is not a sign that the story has failed. It is the adolescence of a species on the brink of maturity.

Adolescents, as any parent knows, can be brilliant one moment and reckless the next. They can also be maddening. They push boundaries, test identities, slam doors, insist they know better, and then crash into their limits. The potential is there; the integration is not.

If you think of humanity that way, much of our newsfeed starts to make tragic sense.

The hopeful part of Robert’s thesis—and of the Bahá’í perspective he draws on—is that adolescence is not the final word. Winter is not the final season. The same Creator who designed individuals to move from childhood to adulthood has designed humanity, as a whole, to mature.

The question isn’t if. It’s how fast, and how costly, depending on how we use our freedom.

Peace Is Inevitable. But It’s Not Automatic.

“Peace is inevitable” can sound naïve—an empty slogan pasted over very real carnage. Robert doesn’t mean it that way.

He grounds the claim in three convictions:

1. The universe itself is ordered toward harmony.
   
   In the first part of The Way of Unity, he surveys the “peaceful nature of the universe”—the way systems at every level, from atoms to galaxies, tend toward balance and integration. Discord exists, but it’s not the fundamental pattern.
   
   
   
   
2. Humanity’s destiny is to reflect that unity.
   
   He sees the long arc of religious history as God’s way of gradually educating a species with free will, bringing us to a point where we can, finally, act like one human family.
   
   
   
   
3. We now possess global‑scale principles.
   
   In the last 170+ years—since the time of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, whose declarations Bahá’ís commemorate during Ridván—the spiritual “curriculum” has explicitly focused on oneness:
   
   
   
   
   • The oneness of humanity,
   • The equality of women and men,
   • The harmony of science and religion,
   • The need to eliminate extremes of wealth and poverty,
   • The eradication of all forms of prejudice,
   • The protection of nature as a divine trust.

We are no longer guessing what peace might require. The blueprint exists. The difficulty lies in implementation, not revelation.

That’s where “rubber meets the road.” Because if this remains abstract—beautiful language on a page or even a #1 book on Amazon—it will never reshape our neighborhoods, our institutions, or our hearts.

So how does this vision get traction in the here and now?

From Nucleus to World: Where the Way of Unity Becomes Visible

One of the most striking things in our conversation was how practical Robert is. He’s not content with lofty ideals. He wants to see them embodied.

He emphasized a simple but profound strategy:

“Peace in today’s world has to be accomplished starting locally with a strategy that is globally scalable.”

In the Bahá’í community, this shows up as a focus on three “protagonists”:

1. The individual – each of us as moral agents with free will.
2. The community – our neighborhoods, networks, and local circles.
3. Institutions – the structures and systems that coordinate our collective life.

Neglect any one of these, and things go sideways:

• If we focus only on institutions, we get the “nanny state,” dependency, and eventual collapse.
• If we focus only on individuals, we get radical individualism, fragmentation, and powerlessness in the face of giant systems.
• If we talk about “community” but never build concrete patterns of action, we get sentiment without substance.

Robert pointed to thousands of small Bahá’í‑inspired efforts around the world—documented in the book For the Betterment of the World—where people are learning to hold these three together.

It looks like:

• A handful of children in a Kenyan village gathering each week to learn spiritual virtues and serve their neighbors.
• A junior‑youth group in a Chicago neighborhood analyzing media, planning a small service project, and discovering their capacity to contribute.
• A study circle in India where adults read and consult on texts about prayer, action, and community life—and then go try it, reflect, and adjust.
• Local institutions—whether Bahá’í administrative bodies or informal councils—learning to consult instead of dictate, to support instead of control.

The interesting thing is that the logic of these activities is the same whether you’re in a rural African village or a high‑rise in New York:

• Gather a small group.
• Read and reflect on principles that foster unity and service.
• Pray.
• Consult.
• Take a small step of action together.
• Reflect.
• Repeat.

These are what I like to call efforts at the cellular level of human society. They’re not flashy. They rarely make headlines. But they are where the way of unity becomes concrete.

That’s also the spirit behind our Facets of One devotional—now being used in a number of communities across the U.S. It’s a simple tool: nine short gatherings, drawing from the world’s scriptures (including the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh), with time for silence and conversation, “without argument, without division.”

It’s not a grand conference. It’s a living room, a circle, a nucleus.

From there, as Robert emphasizes, patterns can scale. Not by imposing uniformity, but by letting principles travel while expressions remain local.

In that sense, The Way of Unity hitting #1 in the Bahá’í category during Ridván is less about a sales milestone and more about this: the ideas that have been piloted quietly in thousands of neighborhoods are starting to surface in the wider conversation.

What This Means for Us

Where does all this leave you and me?

Robert ended our conversation with this:

“We really do live in a time when the greatest need is a healing vision guiding us back to a consciousness of wholeness that connects us all. What the world needs now is a world‑embracing vision that would heal a divided humanity.”

I’d add:

• That vision is not meant to stay in books or letters from international bodies.
• It is meant to be inhabited—by individuals, communities, and institutions that choose unity over division, consultation over combat, service over self‑assertion.

You are created in the image of God.

And God loves His creation.

The invitation is to align your free will with the direction the Creator has already set for the universe: toward wholeness, not fragmentation; toward peace, not perpetual adolescence.

In practical terms, that might look like:

• Starting or joining a small devotional or study circle in your neighborhood.
• Bringing a “consultative” spirit into your family, workplace, or congregation: listening, seeking truth together, rather than winning arguments.
• Refusing to let cynicism have the last word, even as you stay clear‑eyed about the dragons and gargoyles at the gate.

Peace is not automatic. But if Robert is right—and I believe he is—it is written into the DNA of creation as our ultimate destination.

The way of peace is being made known.

The question is whether we will walk it.