Synopsis
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 out families, with our neighbors, and in our meetings and churches, all possible through our love for 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.”
About the Author(s)
Kenneth Boulding was born in 1910 in Liverpool, England. Raised a Methodist, he joined the Religious Society of Friends when he was an undergraduate at Oxford. Starting as a chemist, he went on to become an economist, beginning studies at the University of Chicago in 1932. He became a citizen of the United States in 1937. In 1941 he married Elise Biorn Hansen; they had five children and sixteen grandchildren. From the beginning, Kenneth and Elise were central to the peace research movement and active in many Friends Meetings and organizations. Kenneth Boulding taught in many universities, published thirty-five books and served as president of the American Economics Association, the International Peace Studies Association, the Society for General Systems Research and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also a noted Quaker poet, composing There is a Spirit: The Nayler Sonnets (PHP #337) and Sonnets from the Interior Life. He wrote poetry until his last days; Pendle Hill published his most recent poems in the 1994 compilation Sonnets from Later Life: 1981-1993. Kenneth Boulding died in 1993. Pendle Hill Pamphlet #374