In this conversational segment, Bishop Michael B. Curry and a co‑speaker explore the essential role of community in realizing true brotherly love, arguing that love cannot be limited to romantic Eros but requires a broader, organized framework such as churches or civic groups. They reflect on the pandemic’s forced isolation, noting how the lack of communal touchpoints highlighted humanity’s need for embodied connection—body and soul together. Curry emphasizes that humans are “embodied spirits” and cites ancient wisdom, including Jewish burial customs and biblical teachings, that forbid solitary existence. The dialogue stresses practical steps for maintaining contact (Zoom, texts, calls) as the foundational building block of human community. Both express hopeful optimism that, once lockdowns subside, people will actively seek out churches or other multigenerational gatherings, re‑energizing civic engagement and deepening relational bonds.
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Your study of love in your book, it's really profound because in order to facilitate the brotherly love that's there, it requires a community. And it's more than one person. And I feel like, okay, Eros, we got that. Okay, you can find a partner. That's what Tinder is for, right? So you get that that's like the lowest hanging fruit, but then you need like an operating system or a framework to have the community there. And that is a role that churches have long held, that, you know, veterans of foreign war or, you know, the various, you know, societies where people would go to do that, or, you know, heck, knitting circles, for lack of a better word. And a lot of that has just evaporated and gone away. And I'm kind of hopeful that having a profound lack of that for a brief period during the pandemic is going to make people come out and say, you know what? I'm going to go. Whether it's join a church or just join a civic community thing, I'm going to go regularly and get to know the people there, even if I don't know them that well. I mean, you have that when you're in college, you have that when you're in high school. It's built in, and then they toss you out in the real world. You get a partner and it's all about Eros and maybe some community at work. But I'm definitely seeing, now that I'm a little older and wiser, the wisdom of having churches in communities or just any of those organized, multi generational things out there. Do you think it's going to happen when we finally kind of come out of the lockdown, that people are going to be more civic minded just because they got to fill up their brotherly love cups?
I hope so. I think it might get there. I hope so, because I think, like I said, I know I need. I mean, I. Yeah, it's. I mean, I feel it in myself and I hear other. I'm having conversations with people about it. It's. It's. There is. We are not disembodied spirits. We are embodied spirit. You know what I mean? We are body and soul, so to speak, all mixed up together. I mean, that's. And somehow we need both to be whole. And this has been an experience of the absence of the ways of community that we were used to and finding alternatives, trying to be creative. I mean, you know, told church folk, I said, look, if you hide, stay in touch with each other, Stay in touch. It's the building block. It's maybe only be the first building block, but it's the building block of human community. It's the one thing we can do. We may not get to the higher rungs of human community, but stay in touch. If you're high tech, zoom if you're low tech, text, if you're no text, call. But whatever it is, stay in touch. Keep that human contact. Keep. Don't let anybody be alone. Don't let anybody. I mean there's wisdom in the Jewish tradition that when someone dies, someone always sits with the body. See, that's telling us something. That's ancient wisdom. Ancient folk figured something out. Nobody's supposed to be alone.
Yeah.
It is not good that the human one be alone. That's God talking in the Bible. It's not. I didn't make y' all for that. I made you to be together. I hope as whenever this ends or evolve slowly ends, however it ends with not a bang, but a whimper. I suppose I hope that there will be a re energizing and a re engaging of human community on some deeper levels. Because we have had an experience of it not working when we don't have that.
Profound words. And I really think we will experience that. That's what I'm reading here. There's a yearning that it was too quiet to hear because we were too busy. And now that everyone's at home and not driving around that it's coming out and it'll be a different situation. I don't know what it's going to look like, but I think we are going to see a lot more people spending a little bit more quality time with people they don't know that well this one.
