A Narrative of Love

Tag: governance

  • Steve Killelea — Love, Peace and the Business of Well-Being

    Steve Killelea — Love, Peace and the Business of Well-Being

    A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill

    ▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube

    Steve Killelea brings an unusual perspective to the conversation: as a highly successful technology entrepreneur who chose to direct his resources toward measuring and building peace, he has spent decades asking what conditions allow societies to flourish — and what love has to do with it.

    He introduces the concept of positive peace — not merely the absence of violence, but the presence of the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. These include well-functioning government, low levels of corruption, free flow of information, equitable distribution of resources, and high levels of human capital. What strikes him, looking across the data from the Global Peace Index, is that these are also the conditions that make people happiest and most prosperous — suggesting that peace, well-being and love are not separate ideals but expressions of the same underlying orientation toward life.

    The conversation explores how his philanthropic work through the Charitable Foundation has taken him into some of the world’s most fragile communities, and how that direct encounter with suffering changed him. He reflects on the relationship between inner transformation and outer change — and on what business leaders and institutions could accomplish if they oriented themselves toward the well-being of all rather than the interests of the few.

    His closing thought is simple: the most peaceful societies are also the most loving ones.

    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).

  • Bob Boisture — Love, Justice and the Flourishing of All

    Bob Boisture — Love, Justice and the Flourishing of All

    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).

  • Lene Rachel Andersen — Love, Bildung and the Nordic Secret

    Lene Rachel Andersen — Love, Bildung and the Nordic Secret

    A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill

    ▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube

    Lene Rachel Andersen brings the tradition of Bildung — the European, and particularly Nordic, practice of deep human formation and development — into conversation with love. She tells the largely forgotten story of how the Folk High School movement of the 19th and 20th centuries cultivated inner transformation, self-awareness and self-authority in young people, and how this empowerment from the bottom up was the quiet foundation of the strong democracies and welfare societies of Scandinavia.

    She argues that modern education has made a profound error in stripping beauty, communal singing, meaning-making and spiritual development from the curriculum in pursuit of productivity — producing, she suggests, exactly the angry, frustrated and anxious young people we now see. If we have an educational system so focused on science and technology so people can go out and be producers and consumers, they will lose all the meaning-giving, purpose-giving parts of education.

    The conversation explores what it would mean to recover these dimensions — to lift from the bottom and ensure that every person has access to the skills, understanding and meaning-making that allows them to thrive for themselves and for others.

    Lene’s closing vision is one of narrative renewal: moving from a story of exploitation and extraction to one in which humanity reconnects with the fullness of what it has been and what it might yet become — embracing cultural and biological diversity, and the extraordinary richness of the living world we have inherited.

    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).

  • Lord John Alderdice — Love, Peace and the Politics of Healing

    Lord John Alderdice — Love, Peace and the Politics of Healing

    A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill

    ▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube

    Lord Alderdice draws on his experience as Leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland and his central role in negotiating the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to explore what love actually looks like in political practice. He reflects on a fundamental insight that guided the peace process: that new political structures cannot create better communal relationships; rather, it is only by first addressing the disturbed historical relationships between people and communities that new structures can emerge which genuinely serve them.

    The conversation probes the moral complexity of peacemaking: the sense that reaching agreement may feel like a betrayal of those who suffered, while failing to reach it betrays future generations. Lord Alderdice reflects on how genuine political leadership requires humility, a willingness to engage with everyone as human beings beyond their political positions, and a sense of belonging to a larger community of generations — those who came before and those who will follow.

    He also speaks to the place of silence in public life, recounting how a proposal for two minutes of silence at the opening of the new Northern Ireland Assembly was agreed and continues to this day — a small but significant act of creating space for reflection within institutions built on conflict.

    The conversation closes on the limits of measurement in understanding well-being, and the importance of empathy, imagination and relationship as the deepest resources available to those who govern.

    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).