Radical Love Research Articles

Dialogic reconstruction of memories of violent sexual-affective relationships via dialogic gatherings of “Radical Love”

When a violent intimate relationship occurs, this experience becomes part of the person’s autobiographical memory. Given its prospective functions, the reconstruction of those memories of violent sexual-affective relationships could be an effective tool to prevent future revictimization. The study presented in this article examined the impact of a dialogic gathering of the Radical Love book on the reconstruction of memories of violent sexual- affective relationships. A sample of 48 young women, who had experienced at least one violent sexual affective-relationship were divided into an experimental (n = 24) and a control group (n = 24); they were asked to recall a violent sexual- affective relationship and write it down. The memory reports were collected in two stages. Between both reports, the experimental group read some chapters of the Radical Love book and engaged in a dialogic gathering. Memory quality was measured through the Memory Experiences Questionnaire (MEQ-SF). In the intervention group, the intensity of the emotion associated with the memory recall decreased, and participants became more critical towards the memory of what happened and more aware of the reactions and sensations experienced during the relationship. Dialogic gatherings with Radical Love can support the prevention of gender violence revictimization via transformative memory reconstruction.

The Depths of Christ’s Love

AbstractThis article seeks to overcome the conventional separation between agape and eros and explores the full humanity and embodiment of Jesus Christ by focusing on his divine eros. When eros turns creative, sacramental, and prophetic, divine eros emerges. The story of the encounter between Jesus and the woman in Luke 7:36‐50 receives a fresh interpretation in light of the presence of divine eros. Divine eros is a manifestation of Jesus’ embodied radical love. Confronting unprecedented global challenges, the ecumenical movement is searching for new wineskins to unleash relational power at its diverse levels to rejuvenate itself. Lessons from Jesus’ art of loving might serve as a rich inspiration for those who desire to do justice to the sacred web of life and to love well as bridge‐building instruments of Christ’s love.

Love on the Front Lines: Asian American Motherscholars Resisting Dehumanizing Contexts through Humanizing Collectivity

ABSTRACT In this article, we, four Asian American Motherscholars, share our collective resistance and resilience and our commitment to practicing solidarity through the intentional centering of radical love in our interactions with one another and in our professional lives. Through collaborative autoethnographic analysis grounded in a framework of Asian American feminist coalitional resistance, we share how our relationship, built on our fluid and multiple identities as Asian American Motherscholars and alliance, allowed us to challenge dominant structures of dehumanization to make space to honor our humanity. We highlight the period of time from mid-March 2020 to mid-May 2020, immediately following social-distancing orders in our respective states due to COVID-19, as a particularly salient moment at which the nexus of our identities took center stage in our conversations and collaboration. Our study focuses on the central research questions, How, through love, can we resist dehumanization in times of crisis? How does love make space for our full humanity as Asian American Motherscholars?

Reentering a World in Lockdown: A Poetic Meditation

This essay reflects the spirit of our times, at least in North America. Reentering a generative world in lockdown is juxtaposed with the gains and losses in our communities. “For All Eternity,” my poem, is about the generative cycle of rebirth and death and the forces that move us from decay to regeneration. As the coronavirus pandemic paradoxically rages and abates, in our wisdom, may we heal from this protracted moment in history. May we remember the beloved who helped improve lives. Let us rejoice in the gift of being in community (again), welcoming all who are new to our communities, workplaces, and professions. Besides the demands of our work, before us stretch ever-unfolding challenges of justice. Striving to protect ourselves, loved ones, and societies from multiple pandemics, through courage we enact community-based action, disrupt racial and sexual violence, safeguard vulnerable groups, and protect the earth and every child. With radical love, we embrace humanity and protect freedom and relationships, and by wholeheartedly inhabiting our lives we create space for discomfort and change, hope and renewal. May we all find love, healing, and creativity as we experience what has been and what will be.

Memoirs of the Colored Girls Museum: For Blackgirls Everywhere to Remember That Our Love Is Enuf

This article is a nonconventional archival repository for the Colored Girls Museum in Germantown, Philadelphia, wherein I posit that the museum space is a radical love site through its curation of social relationships, spatial capacities, and navigation of time. Through the transformation of oral history with the museum's founder, Vashti DuBois, I fashioned an avant-garde memoir about how DuBois's own life story is a curation toward radical love that is held by a space. Specifically, I argue that radical love cultivated through the museum space provides a nexus for affective potential, interaction, and interdependence. The creative methodological approach has allowed me to provide a mirror, dynamic archive, and letter for Blackgirls to bear witness to themselves being centered and loved through narrative.

Getting Ready to Relate: Centering Radical Love in Art Teacher Education

Getting Ready to Relate: Centering Radical Love in Art Teacher Education

JESUS’S NEW COMMANDMENT IN JOHN 13:34-35: “LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR MORE THAN YOURSELF” IN ETHICAL PERSPECTIVE

Using historical critical exegesis, this paper argues that Jn 13:34-35 commands a radical love that requires Christians to love their neighbours more than themselves. The aim of the paper is twofold. First, the paper demonstrates that there is a consistent ethical teaching of radical love in John’s Gospel and second, it shows that the ethics of John’s Gospel is not inward looking as some have claimed. If Christians love others as themselves, they fulfil a demand of the Mosaic Law. Jesus reinterpreted the Law in Jn 13:34 and commanded a higher standard of love for his followers. Therefore, Christian mission demands the Jesus standard―loving others more than yourself. Jesus’s example and teaching serve as the gift and the demand.

Positioning Radical Love through Narrative Inquiry to Foster Transformative Language Identities in the Multilingual Classroom

Positioning Radical Love through Narrative Inquiry to Foster Transformative Language Identities in the Multilingual Classroom

Abolish to Transform

The prison is human made and can be human destroyed. This article is a deconstruction of sorts. It argues that we as a society need to burn down the prisons and the precincts so something else can be built in its place. We need to burn down the oppressive logics that capture our imaginations and put radical compassion, love, joy, and empathy in its place.

Review of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and the Greatest Commandment: Radical Love in Times of Crisis

Review of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and the Greatest Commandment: Radical Love in Times of Crisis

Radical Love Unlimited: A Biomythography

Abstract This is an experimental text of creative nonfiction. Radical love is defined, and its trivariate dimensions are illustrated—(re)memory, ritual, and (re)imagination—through the lived and imagined experiences of the author. She engages in the genre of biomythography through the speculative mediums of letter writing, memoir, and journaling. She attempts to expand the category of Blackgirlhood and Blackgirls’ subsequent sacred pursuits of healing. This work may be used as an intervention in a wide variety of capacities, but it stands, first and foremost, as a mirror for Blackgirls to bear witness to themselves being centered, as well as another opportunity for them to also see other Blackgirls who love them. This writing is constructed for their utility.

Radical Love as Praxis

Ethnic studies is a growing movement for curricular and pedagogical practices that reclaim marginalized voices and histories and create spaces of healing for students of color; however, its application to mathematics education has been limited. In this essay, we provide a framework of five ethea of ethnic studies for mathematics education: identity, narratives, and agency; power and oppression; community and solidarity; resistance and liberation; and intersectionality and multiplicity. We describe key concepts and examples of the ethos of ethnic studies.

Embracing Sexuality and Gender: Toward Radical Love

The path to human wholeness and love requires an embrace of sexuality and gender as powerful forces in human lives. This includes vigorous engagement with the life-giving and life-defying forces of sexual passion as that passion intersects with gendered identities and gendered social structures, thus opening doors for ethical reflection. The essay analyzes sexuality’s power and complexity through the intensity of poetry, and it further explores the relationship between sexuality and spirituality in mystical literature. The goal is to identify pathways to celebrate sexuality, reflect and act ethically, and live into the promise of radical love.

“It’s because of community meeting:” toward a responsive reconceptualization of social emotional learning

ABSTRACT Exclusionary discipline disproportionally impacts low-income students of Color. Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) offers a promising framework for reducing the use of suspensions in school. Prominent SEL literature and praxis, however, seem to assume a colorblind stance that neglects to respond to the sociocultural and political realities low-income students of Color experience. This action research inquiry evaluates the impact of an SEL program implemented in the third grade of a low-income, urban school serving children of Color. Students and teachers co-created a program grounded in critical and culturally relevant pedagogies, Black ethic of care, Freirean radical love, and restorative justice practices. This inquiry offers policy implications that might enable educators to further expand the development and enactment of similar responsive SEL programs.

Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and the Greatest Commandment: Radical Love in Times of Crisis by Julie Leininger Pycior

Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and the Greatest Commandment: Radical Love in Times of Crisis by Julie Leininger Pycior

Fighting the plague: “Difficult” knowledge as sirens’ song in teacher education

Of the many plagues that affect communities today, a particularly insidious one is indifference and depersonalization. This plague has been articulated by Albert Camus and then taken up in an educational context by Maxine Greene. In this article we, the authors, respond to Greene’s call to co-compose curricula with our students to fight this plague. Recognizing the role of difficult knowledge as well as conscious and unconscious defenses, we develop an approach to “diversity” harmonious with radical love during these troubled times of conflict and increased visibility of hatred. Through a weaving of our experiential, embodied knowledge with theory, we consider how we might invite students to consider contemporary, historical, and ongoing inequity and structural violence. Like Sirens luring sailors to precarious shores, we seek to entice teachers and students to the difficult knowledge they might otherwise avoid as all of us together consider our ethical responsibilities to each other.

The Impact of Radical Love on Human Memory

The social impact of reading the book Radical Love cannot be grasped by the dominant discourse on the evaluation of social impact. A deep understanding of autobiographical memories must go beyond the quantitative analysis of details and episodes to qualitatively examine the meanings constructed through recollection. Thus, we explored young women’s memories of intimate partner violence through memory narratives and the way these memories were reconstructed when the women read Radical Love. In addition, we examined the personal meanings given to this reading experience through in-depth interviews and a focus group. The results showed that Radical Love made the participants more critical about their memories and made these memories unappealing. This reading led some women to leave violent relationships and transform their prospective thinking. In a time when impact is measured mainly by research articles, this qualitative analysis of the memory transformation promoted by reading Radical Love demonstrates that books can also have a social impact.

On-the-Ground Literacies: Moderating with Media and Theatre to Embody Critical Pedagogy

My work is based on the work of Paulo Freire, and my current tasks come from the endeavors that Freire, Jesús Gomez, Joe Kincheloe and I did on Radical Love in the early part of the new century. Both Radical Love and Critical Pedagogy create my theoretical framework for critical activist pedagogy.

The Pushback Against Populism: Running on "Radical Love" in Turkey

Drawing from the 2019 mayoral elections in Turkey, this paper highlights a path that opposition parties might take to defuse polarized environments and avoid playing into the political traps set by populists in power. The particular type of moral and amplified polarization that accompanies populism's essential "thin" ideology builds a barrier between a populist's supporters and the opposition. Yet the CHP opposition in Turkey has recently won notable victories with its new campaign approach of "radical love," which counteracts populism's polarizing logic and has exposed Erdoğan's weakness.

Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition

Collections of poems from the Islamic mystical tradition are not at all unusual on the American market. Yet most of these collections have been published by presses that specialize in spirituality, so it is quite remarkable to see this collection of poetry translated and edited by Omid Safi being published by Yale University Press. Safi is a Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University in North Carolina, and he is author of numerous books such as Progressive Muslims (2003), The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam (2006) and Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters (2009). Yet he is prob-ably better known as a public intellectual through his blogs and columns.
 To download full review, click on PDF.