The Practice of the Love of God

by Kenneth Boulding, Elise Boulding (Introduction)

Overview

Dare to love God! Dare to practice that love everywhere in God’s family, seeing the divine likeness in everyone, mixture of earth and heaven though we be! This challenge was raised by Quaker economist and peace activist Kenneth Boulding some fifty years ago and is no less alive and provocative today. The prolific writer and poet tells us that we are born to love, that we are living parts of a living whole, and that there are no boundaries in God's whole Kingdom.

To Kenneth Boulding it was "a strange heresy" to treat the realm of emotion as secondary to the intellectual. Rather, he urges us to explore love unlimited by time or place, love in our families, with our neighbors, and in our meetings and churches, all possible through our love of God. The author concludes with his vision for the world and his assurance that there is no room for despair, that God is always redeeming the world, that from the depths of misery there will be "a reawakening of divine love, a new springtime to the weary earth."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940148271178
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	02/19/2014
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #374
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	30
File size:	67 KB

About the Author

Kenneth Boulding was born in 1910 in Liverpool, England. Raised a Methodist, he was attracted to the Society of Friends first by the peace testimony, then by the Meeting for Worship, and joined Friends when he was an undergraduate at Oxford. Starting as a chemist, he became an economist, came to the University of Chicago as a graduate student in 1932, and emigrated to the United States in 1937. Kenneth Boulding taught in many universities, published some thirty-five books, served as president of the American Economic Association, the International Studies Association, the Society for General Systems Research, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is known as a Quaker poet through the Nayler Sonnets (There Is a Spirit) and Sonnets From the Interior Life. Kenneth Boulding was writing sonnets right to his last days; the later ones in Sonnets From Later Life – 1981-1993, published by Pendle Hill in 1994.

Kenneth Boulding died in 1993. He had been married to Elise Biorn-Hansen since 1941; they have five children and sixteen grandchildren. From the beginning, Kenneth and Elise were activists in the peace research movement and in many Friends’ meetings and organizations.