What is love? How can we live a love-filled life? bell hooks’ All About Love
In this two-part course, we explored the nature of love in our lives and communities. Students grappled with the enduring questions: What is love? How can we build a love-filled life?
We read two seminal works on the philosophical, spiritual, and practical aspects of building a life of love: bell hook’s classic work All About Love and Erich Fromm’s work The Art of Loving. hooks uses Fromm’s work as a starting point for her investigation of questions of love.
In All About Love, hooks argues that 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 also relied on hooks writing to discuss the fact that love is essential to healthy and functioning politics.
Student Questions About bell hooks’ All About Love
Premise students brought a wide array of questions to our class discussion. The questions below are just a sampling from the rich and deep conversation we had about the enduring question :“What is love? How can we live a love-filled life?”
Is she asking for a sense of unconditionally when it comes to true love?
Where does the will to love come from? How do you define spiritual growth? Can spiritual growth ever happen in the absence of love?
What about truth-telling when it harms?
How has covid affected our ability/willingness to love in the community-connectedness sense?
How do we transform loneliness into solitude? (Page 141)
In the chapter on lying, I felt that it was the heart of the work. Is integrity necessary to love?
How do we carry this ethic of love into a digital world? Does our experience of the digital world tell us about the love that is or isn’t in our lives?
Is having boundaries the same as "masking," or lying, as hooks writes in Ch. 3? How can we reconcile the need to hold some things private with the demand for honesty as an act of love?
How do we find the strength to stay loving? We might connect this to pages 19-26 on parenting children, but not necessarily.
hooks discusses affirmations as a tool to develop self-love, what kind of affirmations would do this?
bell hooks talks about how our family dynamic, especially in childhood, often shapes what we think “love” means. Which patterns from your childhood do you think were healthy depictions of love? Which patterns do you think are worth unlearning?
Is there ever a situation where lying may be acceptable (or exist) in love for the right reasons? (P 46)
Power versus love ( domination vs. love) dynamic is of interest to me. What is the difference between power and domination?
Why does she seem to believe that you cannot give love to or receive love from others if you don't love yourself? (p.68)
How do we find the strength to stay loving? (We might connect this to pages 19-26 on parenting children, but not necessarily.)
In the chapter on lying, I felt that it was the heart of the work. Is integrity necessary to love?
How do people feel about her talking about parenthood only from the perspective of being a child, not of being a parent?
“The practice of loving is the healing force that brings sustained peace. It is the practice of love that transforms.” What does this mean? (p. 220)
