A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill
▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube
Bob Boisture brings the Fetzer Institute’s foundational commitment to love and forgiveness into direct conversation with the questions of governance, democracy and social transformation. He opens by sharing a three-fold definition of love that has shaped his work: love as a spiritual foundation, love as a habit of the heart through which another’s well-being becomes our own, and love as justice in action — a phrase he encounters in Scherto’s framing and immediately embraces.
He reflects on his own journey as a lawyer who chose non-profit work in order to bring love into institutions — and on the uncomfortable conclusion that follows when you look at every social institution through a lens of love: every system we have is in need of transformation. The conversation addresses the racial reckoning in the United States directly, and Fetzer’s conviction that organisations cannot make a constructive contribution to healing in the outside world until they have done their own inner work first.
Boisture draws on Martin Luther King’s insight that love without power is anaemic, exploring how the Fetzer approach seeks to mainstream inner work within civil society — building communities of genuine belonging, not merely inclusion within norms developed without those communities’ participation. The beloved community King envisioned, he suggests, is not an aspiration but a practice: an enactment of love through sustained dialogue, listening and the patient work of healing the heart of democracy.
This is one of eleven conversations in the A Narrative of Love series, hosted by Dr Scherto Gill in preparation for the 5th Spirit of Humanity Forum, June 2021. The series was sponsored by the Pureland Foundation and the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace (GHFP).