Building Beloved Community: Jacob L. Goodson and Brad Elliott Stone

Is the beloved community local, national, global, or universal? What kind of love is required for the beloved community? Is such a community only an ideal, or can it be actualized in the here and now? That is the subject of the recent co-authored volume, Building Beloved Community in a Wounded World.

Tracing the phrase beloved community from Josiah Royce through Martin Luther King Jr. to a variety of contemporary usages, our guests Jacob L. Goodson and Brad Elliott Stone debate answers to the above questions. Along with Rev. Philip Rudolph Kuehnert, these three authors agree about the importance of beloved community but disagree on the details.

These differences come out through arguments over the local vs. the universal, the type of love the beloved community calls for, and what it means to conceptualize community. Ultimately, they argue, the purpose of beloved community involves responding to the cries of the wounded and those who suffer in the wounded world.

Jacob L. Goodson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas.
Brad Elliott Stone is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean in the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California.