The Beloved Community as Aesthetic Theory

In his call for nonviolent resistance, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned the transformative power of the Beloved Community. Likened to the kingdom of God and influenced by the writing of Josiah Royce, the Beloved Community encompasses a location where the face of the other can be transfigured through emancipatory love, which extends even to one’s enemies. The Beloved Community is a place of equality, justice and equity, an inclusive space where the unique personality of the individual can encounter democratic structures. The hope for the transfiguration of the face of the Other requires metamorphosis of projection and the interpretive group mind, re-creation of space, and reduction of self-interest within a mutually responsible moral community. Transcendent atonement can emerge within a lived liberation psychology that is creative, transpersonal, ecological, and developmental. The revelation of divine love co-occurs with awareness of diaspora and the confined spaces that are transmitted intergenerationally for oppressed people. Approaching the view of authentic love from the vantage point of a non-religious Jew who was forced to leave Nazi Germany, Erich Fromm’s vision of a sane society critiqued the manipulation of personality by the human-as-commodity ethic, mechanism, and alienation from nature and others. Robotic conformity, rootlessness, and derailed transcendence can emerge from a society that values consumption over existence. In contrast, authentic love may flourish when one encounters existential threat and powerlessness yet chooses ethics, personal responsibility, reason, and creativity, eliciting transfiguration of the face of the other and a pursuit of a call to meaning.