Is the beloved community local, national, global, or universal? What kind of love is required for the beloved community? Is such a community only an ideal, or can it be actualized in the here and now? Tracing the phrase beloved community from Josiah Royce through Martin Luther King Jr. to a variety of contemporary usages, Goodson, Kuehnert, and Stone debate answers to the above questions. The authors agree about the importance of beloved community but disagree on the details. These differences come out through arguments over the local vs. the universal, the type of love the beloved community calls for, and what it means to conceptualize community. Ultimately, they argue, the purpose of beloved community involves responding to the cries of the wounded and those who suffer in the wounded world.

Jacob L. Goodson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas.



Brad Elliott Stone is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean in the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California.



Philip Rudolph Kuehnert is a retired Lutheran Pastor living on the sunrise side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He combined forty years of pastoral ministry with twenty-five years as a pastoral psychotherapist in New Orleans, Atlanta, and Fairbanks (Alaska) before retiring to Virginia.