Is the Beloved Community Still a Viable Idea in America Today? My Convo with Adam Taylor [WTL Author Salon]
PLUS, a 20% subscription discount offer for spring.
Thanks to all of you who joined the live conversation last night at my latest live WTL Author forum with Adam Taylor, president of Sojourners and author of A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community. I’m including the recording of the conversation below. Tune in to hear how Adam reimagines Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the beloved community for our contemporary moment of racial backlash.
And a reminder: I’m offering a 20% spring discount on paid subscriptions through the end of April. Paid subscribers get access to live WTL author forums, the ability to comment on posts, and other occasional perks. And it of course supports my ability to bring you breaking research, analysis, and insights about religion, white Christian nationalism, and protecting our pluralistic democracy. If you are able, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter as we face the assaults on democracy together. If you’re already a paid subscriber—thank you!
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A More Perfect Union has just been released in paperback. If you purchase using the link below, a portion of your purchase goes to support this newsletter.
About Adam
The late Rep. John Lewis, who wrote the foreword to the book, had this to say about Adam: “Adam Taylor has made conscious decisions to get in the way of injustice—whether it’s the AIDS pandemic, the pervasive scandal of poverty, or in ending the genocide in Darfur…. I’m proud to see the struggle to build God’s Beloved Community continue….”
Rev. Adam Russell Taylor is president of Sojourners, an ecumenical Christian organization that works to advance justice and peace. He previously led the Faith Initiative at the World Bank Group, served as Vice President of Advocacy at World Vision U.S., was cofounder and executive director of Global Justice, and was selected as a White House Fellow under the Obama administration. A graduate of the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, and the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology, Taylor is ordained in the American Baptist Church and the Progressive National Baptist Convention and serves at the Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia.
About the Book
America stands on a knife’s edge. If we are to survive this moment, with its pitfalls and perils, we have to figure out how to be together differently. Rev. Adam Russell Taylor offers a path forward to making real the Beloved Community—a new consensus—for our time.
-Eddie S. Glaude, author of Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Time
America is at a pivotal crossroads. The soul of our nation is at stake and in peril. A new public narrative is needed to unite Americans around common values and to counter the increasing discord and acrimony in our politics and culture. The process of healing and creating a more perfect union in our nation must start now. The moral vision of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Beloved Community, which animated and galvanized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, provides a hopeful way forward. In A More Perfect Union, Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners, reimagines a contemporary version of the Beloved Community that will inspire and unite Americans across generations, geographic and class divides, racial and gender differences, faith traditions, and ideological leanings.
ICYMI and Upcoming
Here’s an invitation to join me,
, , and for a live conversation this Thursday (4/3) at 5:00pm ET. It’s part of our weekly Unscripted podcast series. Come join us!
And here’s my latest post about the Zacchaeus Foundation, which is creatively imagining a way to make reparations for past racial injustices a reality in northwest Arkansas.
Yes...now more than ever.
Thank you for the excellent conversation with Adam Russel Taylor about his book A More Perfect Union. I have been thinking a lot about the word love which is multi-layered and complex. I think it is vital to open up discussions about how love is central to well-being. When both giving love and receiving love are both experienced with confidence and mutual trust both individually and collectively, justice is possible. Rejection and abandonment trigger fear which often clouds judgement and triggers anger and defensiveness. Teaching vulnerability as a strength is countercultural. Creating safety grounded in beloved community is revolutionary. Safety invites the vulnerability necessary to open up possibility. When those who have benefitted from oppressing others choose vulnerability and listen to those who have had no choice, the seeds of beloved community are sewn--challenging work. The zoom conversation was very inspiring. I have made a request to my library to purchase A More Perfect Union.