Love Across Difference: Learning Through Story and Dialogue

Love Across Difference: Learning Through Story and Dialogue

As humans, we love by being loved. Yet, we realize that again and again our attention is drawn to the ways in which human individuals and groups fail to love. We perceive the other as profoundly different often seeing them as inferior or inimical to ourselves.

How do we learn to love across difference? Is it possible? Does crossing the boundary of difference dissolve our identity or uniqueness? How do we live in a world where crossing boundaries and encountering difference is a daily practice? Is love across difference a supposition or an imperative? In all its iterations, we intend the phrase as an evocative expression and invitation. The title, Love Across Difference: Learning Through Story and Dialogue, calls us to a place of introspection, perhaps reconciliation, in a process of discovery ultimately raising more questions than answers.

Mary Catherine Bateson and Steven Guerriero invite readers to think in new ways about difference, fostering greater empathy, compassion, and cooperation. The authors lead us on an enchanting path of discovery-sharing stories, cultivating curiosity, and asking provocative questions.

Joining the conversation calls for openness and a willingness to take a fresh look at how we come to know, learn, communicate, and make meaning in an increasingly ambiguous and paradoxical world. We trace the unfolding patterns of interdependence that form the fabric of relationships, pointing us toward new perspectives, beauty, and greater understanding.

Coming to know and learn entails change, which is sometimes painful.... We need to learn to love and care about the well-being of distant peoples, who look and behave differently, speaking unfamiliar languages. And we need to care for members of other species, the changing oceans and atmosphere, wounded and dying forests, the many different life forms of our planet. All are kin. All are vulnerable.

In the past, mystics of many traditions have sought unity, a unity that is not uniformity, using different metaphors to describe their profound intuitions of oneness. We are followers of their lead. Such is the subject of this book.