Dear friends,
I’m delighted to share that my video course “Neighbor-Love” is now fully available for free on YouTube.
This seven-lecture course dives deep into the history, spirituality, and contemporary practice of neighbor-love. It’s core message? We’re all fundamentally connected, equally precious in value, and invited by God to make love the very center of our lives.
Each lecture unfolds through several short videos – typically between two and five minutes long. This bite-sized pacing keeps the feast light and lets you sample what looks interesting to you.
Neighbor-love is such a beautiful, hopeful, transformative way of being human. It plots a thought-provoking story of spiritual and cultural revolution, leading to historic innovations like public hospitals and human rights. Jesus promised, “Love God and your neighbor, and you will flourish” (Luke 10:28). I hope this course energizes your faith and flourishing as we write together today’s chapter of neighbor-love.
In the course, I delve into many of our most inspiring teachers and practitioners – from Jesus to St. Augustine to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mother Teresa. I also go head-to-head with some of the fiercest critics of neighbor-love like Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.
The course also wrestles with big questions like the relationship of love and justice, the place of self-love in neighbor-love, how neighbor-love reframes nationalism, and why we Christians have such a checkered history of loving our neighbors. There’s lots of complexity and richness here.
I hope you enjoy exploring “Neighbor-Love,” and I’d love to hear what it stirs in you. Please check it out and let me know!
Lastly, here’s a quick outline of the course to give you the big picture:
Lecture 1: The Crisis and Hope of Humanity unpacks why the ethics of neighbor-love is so important, how it revolutionized ancient culture, and how it provides compelling answers to some of our deepest questions and needs today.
Lecture 2: Origins of Neighbor-Love: The Hebrew Bible traces the origins of neighbor-love in Hebrew society and scripture. It discusses their revolutionary breakthroughs and troubling problems, serving as a mirror for us today.
Lecture 3: Jesus: The Revolution of Neighbor-Love examines Jesus’s brilliant teachings and practices of neighbor-love. It shows how Jesus reinterpreted and even revolutionized the traditional vision of neighbor-love, launching a new movement that would change the world.
Lecture 4: The Revolution Continues: Neighbor-Love in the New Testament studies the remaining teachings of neighbor-love in the New Testament. It explores how Paul and Jesus’s other first followers laid the foundation for early Christianity’s counter-cultural movement, subverting the elitist, violent values of the Roman Empire.
Lecture 5: 20 Centuries: The Red Thread of Neighbor-Love surveys nine of the most profound thinkers and critics of neighbor-love from the second century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Here I explore the development, corruption, and critique of neighbor-love, providing crucial lessons for us today.
Lecture 6: Modern Masters of Neighbor-Love dives more deeply into five of the most inspiring 20th century preachers and practitioners of neighbor-love: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Oscar Romero, Mother Teresa, and Jean Vanier. These modern “masters” were far from perfect but offer energizing paradigms for our future.
Lecture 7: Neighbor-Love Now: A Humble/Dangerous/Hopeful New Beginning for Humanity concludes the course. It (1) explores three inspiring contemporary practitioners of neighbor-love (Wayne Gordon, Gary Haugen, and Eden Gelan), (2) summarizes the meaning of neighbor-love, and (3) wrestles with several questions about how to understand and embody neighbor-love today.
May our love flourish!
Andrew
