Dear friends,

Has a small space ever felt surprisingly spacious to you?

This week, I spent three days in a tiny, sound-proof recording booth in Chicago. That little room had just enough space for a chair, microphone, music stand, and a shelf with bottles of water. Once I squeezed in and closed the door, I couldn’t see or hear anything outside the “studio brick.”

And yet, inside that space, thousands of years of history and so many inspiring people and places in our world came to voice. More personally, decades of my life and some of my most cherished memories came alive afresh. I was recording the audiobook for Reviving the Golden Rule.

Reviving the Golden Rule book tells the story of how “Love your neighbor as yourself” emerged in an unlikely community amidst violent empires. It then traces how neighbor love has brought healing across the human adventure.

This love has been embodied in some of our most beloved ancestors like Ruth and Boaz in ancient Israel, Julian of Norwich in medieval England, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany. I was so honored to revoice their sacred words and show how their stories belong within an ever-expanding movement of hope. This movement continues today and calls us to join in seeing “others” as precious neighbors.

Author and educator bell hooks wrote,

“[W]e want to live in a culture where love can flourish. We yearn to end the lovelessness that is so pervasive in our society.”

And still, she observed, “schools for love do not exist.”

My hope is that Reviving the Golden Rule can serve as a small “school for love” with a surprising spaciousness inside. When we learn to love our neighbors as ourselves, “All, everyone, everything, belongs,” as Desmond Tutu so beautifully wrote.

I’m delighted this book will also be available as an audiobook. It officially releases on October 2, and you can pre-order it today on Amazon, BookShop, and wherever books are sold.

Until then…

A Taste of Peace

I’m pleased to invite you to register for the first live event focused on Reviving the Golden Rule.

Peace Catalyst International (PCI) is hosting this free online conversation on Thursday, August 28 at 1pm Eastern Time. PCI’s director and experienced peacemaker, Peter Digitale Anderson, and I will explore some of the book’s story and how neighbor love can help heal othering today. I so enjoyed talking with Peter about my previous book Blessed Are the Others, and I know this discussion will be just as timely, thought-provoking, and energizing.

Here’s PCI’s event description:

“The ‘Golden Rule’— loving one’s neighbor and doing to others as we would like to have done to us — is at the heart of the Bible’s ethical teaching. It’s taught to children in Sunday School across the country. Yet we have so often failed to put it into practice when it matters the most.

We’re in a time of deep othering, marked by toxic polarization, beloved neighbors being violently arrested and deported, the rights and protections for our most vulnerable neighbors being demolished, genocide, war and oppression across the globe, and a widespread sense of fear and instability. So, how can Christ’s teaching of neighbor-love — when taken seriously — offer a path toward a just, flourishing, and reconciled future?

Join author and peacemaker Andrew DeCort and PCI’s Peter Digitale Anderson to discuss Andrew’s upcoming book, Reviving the Golden Rule: How the Ancient Ethic of Neighbor Love Can Heal the World. We’ll explore the roots of this ancient yet essential teaching, reflect on examples of how Christians have lived this out in powerful ways, and discuss how Christians today can meaningfully model neighbor-love in our relationships, communities, and politics.”