A Narrative of Love

Tag: social-transformation

  • 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).

  • Dr Joy DeGruy — Radical Love and the Path to Collective Healing

    Dr Joy DeGruy — Radical Love and the Path to Collective Healing

    A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill

    ▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube

    Dr Joy DeGruy speaks from a place of profound personal and intellectual honesty about what it means to grow up Black in America — proud of one’s heritage and yet daily confronted with the dissonance between the ideals of equality and the lived reality of structural dehumanisation. Her academic work, she explains, did not come from her four degrees; it came from the recognition that she had never been taught about her own people, their contributions or their suffering.

    The conversation traces the concept of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome — the intergenerational transmission of trauma from centuries of American chattel slavery — and the way unhealed historical wounds become encoded in behaviour, self-perception and community life. Crucially, Dr DeGruy insists that healing is not about guilt: it is about recognition, agency and working together. When people know better, they tend to do better.

    She reflects on the African concept of “I see you” — a gesture of acknowledgement, belonging and love that speaks directly to the wound of invisibility — and on the radical ethics of love she places at the centre of the path to social transformation. Love, she argues, in combination with truth, destroys the lie on which systems of oppression depend.

    As Scherto observes in their exchange, love is a movement, an action, that shortens the distance between people — the relational starting point for healing. And healing, Dr DeGruy is clear, begins with each of us: your scope of power starts with you.

    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).

  • Dr Vandana Shiva — Seeds of Love

    Dr Vandana Shiva — Seeds of Love

    A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill

    ▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube

    Dr Vandana Shiva opens with a striking claim: agriculture is an act of love. From her earliest experience of her father’s nurturing care to her lifetime of work defending seeds, soils and the rights of farming communities, she traces a single thread — that love is not sentiment but relationship, not abstraction but practice rooted in the living world.

    She articulates a vision of love as compassion, as the recognition of interconnectedness that makes exploitation impossible: when there is unconditional trust, there is unconditional love. The problems humanity faces — ecological destruction, corporate monoculture, the erosion of commons — arise, she argues, from blindness, denial and a fear of love; from a manipulated world of domination and control that severs the thread of relationship between human beings and the living systems that sustain them.

    Vandana Shiva calls for spiritually inspired activism that does not mimic the aggression of oppressive systems: non-violent power grows, she insists, while violent systems, being ultimately loveless, cannot endure. She describes economies of love — drawing on Aristotle’s sense of economy as the art of living well — in which the only true measure of wealth is right relationship, care and the recovery of the commons.

    And she closes with a seed: a simple, radical act of love available to anyone. If we can save one seed, she says, it will hold within it the imagination of love.

    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).