All About Love: New Visions
bell hooks · 2000
bell hooks argues America is a loveless culture because we never agreed what love is. Borrowing from M. Scott Peck, she defines love as a verb, a will to nurture spiritual growth, and adds a feminist edge: no love without justice.
It reframes love from a feeling that happens to you into a chosen practice, and insists there can be no love without justice.
Three of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of All About Love pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first three.
- Love is a verb, not a feeling. hooks insists 'love is as love does', an intention plus an action we choose, so we should judge people by what they do, not by what they claim to feel.
- The working definition, borrowed and credited to M. Scott Peck (echoing Erich Fromm): love is 'the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.' hooks' own contribution is adding justice.
- Love has seven ingredients that must combine: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honest open communication. Care alone is not love, the whole set has to be working together.
The other 4 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 9 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- A Loveless Culture With No Shared Words
- Clarity: Give Love Words
- Justice: Childhood Love Lessons
- Honesty: Be True to Love
- Commitment: The Ground of Self-Love
- Spirituality and the Love Ethic
- Greed: How Consumer Culture Corrodes Love
- Community and Mutuality: Decentering Romance
- Loss, Healing, and the Return to Love
Finish All About Love tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
More from the Personal Growth shelf
-
10x Is Easier Than 2x Dan Sullivan & Benjamin Hardy A radical reframe that says chasing a 10x goal forces the ruthless focus and letting-go that a \"sensible\" 2x goal never will. -
12 Rules for Life Jordan B. Peterson Practical rules for bringing order, meaning, and responsibility to your life. -
A New Earth Eckhart Tolle The book that reframed personal growth as a species-wide shift in consciousness: showing that the ego isn't who you are, and that… -
Awaken the Giant Within Tony Robbins A comprehensive system for taking control of your emotions, decisions, and destiny. -
Big Magic Elizabeth Gilbert Encourages living a more creative, fearless life by releasing perfectionism and fear. -
Bittersweet Susan Cain In a culture obsessed with relentless positivity, this is the permission slip to feel your longing and sorrow, and to discover…