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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. There's a chapter in my next guest's new book that begins with a question, How do I find the energy to keep loving when the world seems to be going the other way?

Listeners, can you relate? The quote comes from none other than Bishop Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and you may remember him from his historic sermon at the royal wedding. He also served as officiant for the funeral of the late Senator John McCain. Some of you didn't know that. His new book is called Love is the way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times. He joins me now. Bishop Curry, it's always a gift when you come on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Bishop Michael Curry: Thank you for having me. I always love coming, love being with you.

Brian: I want to start with a 30-second clip from your sermon at the royal wedding, that I think is really powerful, and one that begins to answer a question that some of our listeners might have, which is, why to talk about love, when the central fight is for justice. Here's 30 seconds of you.

Bishop Curry: If humanity ever captures the energy of love, it will be the second time in history that we have discovered fire. Dr. King was right. We must discover love, the redemptive power of love. When we do that, we will make of this old world a new world.

Brian: Bishop Curry, what is love to you, when you talk about it in that context?

Bishop Curry: In that context, I'm using it as the religious tradition coming out of both Judaism and Christianity speaks of love. In some versions of both the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament in the Septuagint, for the Hebrew Scriptures, and then in the Greek New Testament, one of the words that's most frequently used and certainly used by Jesus of Nazareth is the word "agape," which is a particular kind of love. It's a love that is unselfish, sacrificial, that seeks the good, the welfare, and the well being of others, as well as the self. This love is not a sentiment. It's a commitment. It is a decision and a commitment to seek the greatest good possible in every human situation.

That's a commitment to a different kind of life. It is a commitment to an unselfish way of living, and that kind of love really is a game-changer.

Brian: You cited Martin Luther King in that clip, late John Lewis talked about love, and they weren't talking about a wide-eyed love, you weren't either.

Bishop Curry: No, no, not at all. No. Unfortunately, we only have one word for love in English, the word love. In Greek, which was the ancient language of many of the Scriptures, you have the word "eros" for love, "philia." Eros is romantic love. Philia is fraternal love, and "agape." Agape is this unselfish, sacrificial love that really does work for the good, seek the good of others, as well as the self. That's the kind of love that's most frequently talked about in the New Testament and that the religious traditions have lifted up. That's the kind of love that really is the game-changer, because unselfish living is the way to- a democracy doesn't work if everybody is functioning out of selfish self instinct.

Under the Great Seal of the United States, there's the phrase "E Pluribus Unum," from many one, that phrase actually goes back to Cicero of ancient Rome of the Roman Republic. Listen to what Cicero said. "When each person loves the other as much as he loves themselves, it makes one out of many possible."

That's the unselfish way of life. That's the kind of love that actually makes democracy possible. It makes human civilization possible. It makes a world where we don't let children go to bed hungry. It makes a world where we don't let people suffer. It makes a world where we learn how to lay down our swords and shield, like an old song says, Down By The Riverside, "Study War No More." It is a world where justice is real because we care about others, not just ourselves.

Brian: Let me change direction a little bit, or maybe it isn't really a change. You'll tell me, but there's a chapter of your book called What Desmond Tutu and Dolly Parton Have In Common, so I'll bite. What do Desmond Tutu and Dolly Parton have in common?

Bishop Curry: I'm so glad you asked that question. I love that chapter, because everybody looks and says, "What?" If you think about the two of them, they share something profoundly in common. I remember George Bernard Shaw, who said, "Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream things that never were and ask, 'Why not? Why not a different kind of world.'"

Both Desmond Tutu and Dolly Parton's lives were changed by a compelling dream of a better world of a better life. Desmond Tutu in apartheid South Africa, I heard him speak in the early '90s when he was talking about ending apartheid. This was while Nelson Mandela was still in prison, and there was no hope. He ended his talk. I think it was at University of Ohio. He ended his talk by saying, "I have a dream. I believe that one day, my beloved South Africa will be free for all of her children, her Black, her brown, or colored, or Asian, or white, all of her children. I believe it because I believe that God has a dream for South Africa, and nothing can stop God's dream."

When I was Bishop in North Carolina, we participated in a project that was founded by Dolly Parton. It was a project of literacy for children of getting books to children who couldn't otherwise get them. When you read about why she was doing that, it was because she said, "As a little girl, I grew up poor and impoverished and had no hope, but I actually had a dream of a better life." I said, "That's what Dolly Parton and Desmond Tutu have in common." It is that dream of a better world and a commitment to make it happen. That is the work of love.

Brian: My guest, if you're just joining us, is Bishop Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and he's got a new book called Love Is The Way.

Your father was a minister, I see, and to keep this on the personal side a little bit after you were talking about your work in North Carolina, you write in the book, "I Remember Hearing My Family, On My Father's Side, In The Empire Of Rural Alabama," talking about how Nazi prisoners of war were treated better than they were. Yet, in spite of it, they believed in America, in its ideals of freedom and equality, with liberty and justice for all," from your book.

That's a tough one for today as the battle for a further, a fuller, I should say, telling of American history seems to compete with a simple patriotism or a simplistic patriotism that some people want to put forward. Why do you think they still believed in America, in your parents' generation, and what you call the empire of Alabama?

Bishop Curry: I think they believed in it, though, they believed in the ideals of America, they knew that there is something so valuable about human freedom and equality and dignity, that if you committed your life to that, and if you work to build a society, where there really was liberty and justice for all, if you really did commit to that, then America could actually live up to the ideals that it propagated, even when it didn't fully live up to them. They believed in those ideals.

I want to suggest that that's precisely what part of the religious enterprise is about, to find the power and the courage to believe in love when everybody else around you wants to hate, to believe in goodness when evil seems to be raging. That's what religion calls us- real religion, if you will, calls us to be counter-cultural, counter-intuitive, to actually stand up when everybody else wants to sit down, to speak up when everybody else wants to be quiet.

It's because you have this ideal, this vision of a better world that prophet Isaiah talks about, a new heaven and a new earth. Red Book of Revelation talks about the same thing, that it is the people who have these ideals, this vision of a new world are the ones who've ever tried to change it. People who are satisfied with the way it is don't bother about it. They just go and watch a football game, and call it a day. Now I'm a Buffalo Bills fan. I like football too, but I believe in these ideals, and those ideals--

Think about it, Brian. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable right. Four score seven years ago, our forefathers brought upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Do your cut, brother. Do you realize what incredible words those are? Those ideals are true. They're right, even when the nation didn't live them. I think the folk who raised me believed in those ideals in spite of the fact that the nation didn't live up to them, and we can do it again.

Brian: An epigraph at the beginning of one of the chapters in your book is a quote from the Austrian- Jewish rabbi Martin Buber, "Love is the responsibility of an I for a you," and in this consists what can not consist in any feeling, the equality of all lovers. What a Martin Buber quote you chose there. Do you think about this idea in the context of the pandemic, our global health crisis? What were you thinking?

Bishop Curry: Yes, actually, I wrote that- that chapter was before the pandemic, but I didn't know this was about to happen.Buber's wisdom, his insight is still true. There is a profound-- When he talks about the equality of lovers, what he was getting at was that if we see each person, each human being, not simply as a thing, he would say as it, but as thou, as someone who is sacred because they bear the image- as Genesis 1 says, "They bear the image of God, which confers-" Dr. King would say, the infinite metaphysical value on each human being.

If we see each other as thou, as fellow children of God, that means we treat each other differently. Cicero had the same insight. When each person loves the other as much as he loves himself, that makes "E Pluribus Unum" possible. That's what Buber grasped and understood. He said, "When we see the other as an it, as a thing, as an object, instead of as a subject of relationship, as a person, as a child of God, when we see another as an it, then the unthinkable becomes possible."

Then chattels, then you can inflate. Notice that every time something diabolical has happened in history, it has been necessary to define the other person as not a human being, but as a thing. Therefore, you can enslave them. Therefore, you can force, remove Indians, native peoples from their land. Therefore, you have a Holocaust. Therefore, you have genocide, you turn the person into a thing, into an it, and you treat them like an it, then anything becomes possible, but if that other person is a thou, a child of God, that changes the relationship and it changes our politics.

Brian: On that, I want to return in our last minute to the question I started the segment with, which is the one that opens the third chapter of your book. It's the question. How do you find the energy to keep loving when the world seems to be going the other way? Can you answer your own question for our listeners?

Bishop Curry: You figure out how to nurture a real relationship, a living relationship, with the source of love which we call God, and you nurture that. Take time every day to be in touch with that God, and dwell deeply with that God, and take time each day to be in touch and dwell deeply with others. I really believe, I'm learning from this pandemic, we need God, and we need each other.

The reason we're all like going kind of crazy, stir crazy, is because we can't be with each other, even though we're each other's biggest headaches, we still need each other. Stay in touch with God, stay in touch with each other. I tell folk, "If you high-tech, Zoom. If you're low-tech, text. If you're no-tech, call, but stay in touch with each other and stay in touch with God." The old slaves used to say it this way, "Walk together children, and don't you get weary because there's a great camp meeting in the promised land."

Brian: Bishop Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal church. Many of you saw him for the first time at his historic sermon at the royal wedding. He also served as officiant for the funeral of the late Senator John McCain. His new book is called Love is the Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times. Bishop, thank you so much. It's an honor.

Bishop Curry: Thank you, and God bless you.

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