What is Love? How Can We Build a Love-Filled Life? bell hook's All About Love & Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving
In this course, we will explore the nature of love in our lives and communities. We’ll grapple with the enduring questions: What is love? How can we build a love-filled life?
This is a two-session course. We’ll read two seminal works on the philosophical, spiritual, and practical aspects of building a life of love.
Session 1: Sunday, February 13 4:00-5:30PM PST
Students will read the bell hook’s classic work All About Love. In the book, hooks shows how love heals the wounds we bear as individuals and as a nation. All About Love is a book that shapes how we conceive of love in our community and personal lives. Students will explore the ways love is essential to healthy and functioning politics.
“All About Love offers radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives. In eleven concise chapters, hooks explain how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood. She offers a rethinking of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring peace and compassion to our personal and professional lives, and asserts the place of love to end struggles between individuals, in communities, and among societies. Moving from the cultural to the intimate, hooks notes the ties between love and loss and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most important love of all.”
Session 2: Sunday, March 6, 2022 4:00-5:30 PM PST
Next, we’ll read Erich Fromm’s philosophical work The Art of Loving. Fromm brings a psychological and philosophical perspective to his exploration of what it means to build and live a loving life. The book explores love in all its aspects—not only romantic love, but also brotherly love, erotic love, self-love, the love of God, and the love of parents for their children.
“In his book, The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm gives theoretical descriptions and practical applications of love in the widest sense of the word, descriptions and applications that are anything but shallow and trite. He describes the deepest roots of our yearning for love. Understanding these roots makes one’s pursuit of love a purposeful effort with a purposeful result, rather than just hoping to win some “love lottery”. Most people are unable to love on the only level that truly matters: love that is compounded of maturity, self-knowledge, and courage. As with every art, love demands practice and concentration, as well as genuine insight and understanding.”
Instructor: Mary Finn
Dates:
Session 1: Sunday, February 13 4:00-5:30PM PST
Session 2: Sunday, March 6, 2022 4:00-5:30 PM PST