As I write this note, two anticipated events in the Catholic world have just occurred: the opening of the 2023 Synod on Synodality in Rome and the publication of Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum, his follow-up to Laudato Si’. The two share a theme that Francis sees as fundamental to the human creature and the world more broadly: relationality. The church comprises a community of encounter and listening, and the human person is profoundly embedded in and related to our world and the creatures within it. “No one is saved alone,” Francis exclaims in Laudate Deum