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Are We Helping to Make the Beloved Community Real?  An Interview with Luther Smith, Emeritus Professor of Church and Community Candler School of Theology, Emory University 

Dr. Smith begins by discussing the Interfaith Children’s Movement, a movement founded by children in 2001 to respond to children’s needs—especially those who are most vulnerable. The outbreak has required the movement to change its efforts to communicate through online platforms.  The movement has focused its efforts on its slogan: “Pray. Learn. Act.”  Muslim, Christian, and Jewish leaders are providing prayers that speak to the vulnerabilities of children during this time; for example to bear public witness through prayer of children who are facing violence in their homes during the stay-at-home orders.  The Interfaith Children’s Movement offers a variety of resources to address children’s vulnerabilities and opportunities for individuals and communities to address those vulnerabilities at its website (www.icmgeorgia.org) 

Luther recounted some important lessons learned from his own family and faith community and how he was raised to care about community health thriving.  “Into my adulthood,” he says, “one question has guided me: how…are the kinds of decisions we’re making and our life together moving toward or away from beloved community.”  Luther provides some historical background to the term “beloved community” to define and contextualize it, both in Dr. King’s civil rights work and in the theological thinking and social advocacy of Howard Thurman. Dr. Smith discusses how this understanding of community provides him with a vision for how to respond when you see others in need: “You really don’t know how to respond to a neighbor in crisis if you have not been a neighbor pre-crisis.”  Together, Dr. Thurman and Dr. Sexton discuss the ways that such a vision can be lived even in the midst of the present outbreak and the anger at the systemic racial injustice that is being felt so powerfully at this moment.  How will we be different when we’re no longer staying-in-place?  Not only our individual actions related to infection spread but, more importantly, in our actions to lift up injustice and move toward the realization of the beloved community.