bell hooks was a feminist theorist, cultural critic, and writer whose work centered love, justice, and the interlocking realities of race, gender, and class. In her view, love is not merely a feeling but an ethic of will, action, and responsibility. This perspective—especially resonant today—directly challenges cultures organized around domination and fear. Her work consistently links personal love to community-building and liberation, bridging inner development and social change.

In this article, she recounts the experience of meeting and interviewing the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh in 1999. She introduces the conversation by reflecting on a decade in which she felt pulled between anti-racism, feminism, sexual liberation, and fundamentalist Christianity, and how Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings helped her resolve that inner divide.

She opens the discussion by observing that the United States was moving away from love, contrasting the culture of the late 1990s with the love-centered ethos of the civil rights movement. She recalls Martin Luther King Jr.’s teaching that we can always begin again through forgiveness, and asks why society has turned away from a “community of love”—and how it might return.

What follows is a dialogue about building beloved community, transforming anger and fear into compassion, and reimagining justice through interbeing and no-self. More than two decades later, the conversation feels strikingly relevant to the challenges we face today.

"Thich Nhat Hanh: We ourselves need love; it’s not only society, the world outside, that needs love. But we can’t expect that love to come from outside of us. We should ask the question whether we are capable of loving ourselves as well as others. Are we treating our body kindly—by the way we eat, by the way we drink, by the way we work? Are we treating ourselves with enough joy and tenderness and peace? Or are we feeding ourselves with toxins that we get from the market—the spiritual, intellectual, entertainment market?

"So the question is whether we are practicing loving ourselves? Because loving ourselves means loving our community. When we are capable of loving ourselves, nourishing ourselves properly, not intoxicating ourselves, we are already protecting and nourishing society. Because in the moment when we are able to smile, to look at ourselves with compassion, our world begins to change. We may not have done anything but when we are relaxed, when we are peaceful, when we are able to smile and not to be violent in the way we look at the system, at that moment there is a change already in the world."

"bell hooks: I think one of the most wonderful books that Martin Luther King wrote was Strength to Love. I always liked it because of the word 'strength,' which counters the Western notion of love as easy. Instead, Martin Luther King said that you must have courage to love, that you have to have a profound will to do what is right to love, that it does not come easy."

ARTICLE: Building a Community of Love: bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh

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