As the poet Robert Frost famously penned, “Something there is that does not love a wall.” And, as experience teaches, walls can be made of stone, wire and, often, attitudes.

I was recently invited to join a “Trek” involving a dozen graduating students from the Johnson School of Management at Cornell University on a tour through Northern Ireland to learn about intractable conflicts and obstacles that hinder reconciliation almost 20 years after the Good Friday/Belfast Peace Agreement.

My brother and I have a friendly dispute on the existence of an afterlife. He poetically defines the soul as “a power borrowed from the wheel of fire that animates the cosmos.” He compares it to an “ember of that cosmic fire” that one rides until death “when the ember is consumed again in the fire.” He describes life as participation “in a sacred, cosmic, evolutionary process striving toward wholeness,” which “may be called God.”