Salvation: Black People and Love (Love Song to the Nation Book 3)

by bell hooks

To this day I vividly recall the pleasure I felt reading what I had been “taught” was the love chapter. From the book of Corinthians I learned that to be loving meant to be kind, forgiving, and full of compassion. I learned that love was more important than faith or hope. Yet the full vision of love evoked in the Scriptures was not realized in most of our homes. Writing about the link between Christian religious experience and love in his essay “The Mark of Churches,” John Alexander reminds us that in theory the church is not only a place of love but a place where we learn to love. However, for Christians of all races these lessons often stay at the level of theory and never become practice. Alexander contends: “Instead, we keep paying far more attention to our work than to loving others. We spend more time cleaning our houses than caring for our relationships. We do whatever our ‘thing’ is and tend not to get around to love.”