While she called herself a Buddhist Christian, a radical feminist, and “queer-pas-gay,” American author bell hooks’ work “All About Love: New Visions” offers a thoughtful reading of the core Christian virtue that ought to inspire and challenge those who may be initially put off by her labels.

hooks, who died in 2021 and spelled her name in all lower case letters to draw attention away from herself, affirms the transcendent quality of love, and an (at least subconscious) understanding of it as originating outside the realm of human work and life. Published on Dec. 22, 1999, this year marks a quarter of a century of hooks’ efforts to unravel the widely held cultural perception of love as being, by nature a, mystery. 

While much of her emphasis on the ungendered language of love could be read as a feminist statement, it can also be read as an understanding of love in the ungendered, unsegregated, platonic-form sense. 

“When we see love as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same,” hooks writes.

This understanding lends itself to a refreshing perspective on love as something defined, something with discernible boundaries and rules, something concrete. The main example she uses to illustrate this point is the fact that abuse is not love and cannot be mislabeled as such. 

The values hooks points to as key components of love all transcend gender: trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility. She also goes on to discuss honesty, justice, vulnerability, self esteem, discipline, and generosity as additional considerations. These are all virtues that men and women alike ought to pursue unencumbered by differences in sex. 

She illuminates subjects and tensions that are often deemed taboo in conservative Christian circles but are essential for deepening our understanding of love in families, relationships, and society at large. 

In the chapter titled “Honesty: Be Truth To Love,” she talks about the suffocating effects of masculinity on a man who values it as his paramount quality. She quotes John Stoltenberg in his book “The End of Manhood: A Book for Men of Conscience.” 

“Learning to live as a man of conscience means deciding that your loyalty to the people whom you love is always more important than whatever lingering loyalty you may sometimes feel to other men’s judgment on your manhood,” he wrote.

Men often consider the quality of “caregiving” to be essentially female, and thereby use it as an excuse to be emotionally absent, negligent fathers. hooks explored care as a quality of love that a child needs from both parents. 

She warns against idolatry of “the relationship” that causes people to abandon friendships and stay in unhealthy situations that could have been left behind in the dating stages. She doesn’t advocate for leaving at the first sign of conflict but understands the dire effects of creating a family where the love shared is unhealthy, unbalanced, or selfish. 

She addresses the free will of the human person, and outline’s a woman’s choice to serve in the house as the sacrificial work that it is — not an expectation or necessary fulfillment. She would likely land in a camp far, far away from one of conservative and possibly even biblical perceptions of womanhood. Nevertheless, her reminders about the virtue required for a woman to fulfill what Hillsdale students so often paint as the natural next step elevates the work and choices of women as a whole. 

Given her particular worldview and political slant, the reading experience is not one of total acceptance without exception. Under the larger umbrella of cynicism, she breaks down the deeper societal influences that have contributed to what she calls “our culture of lovelessness” and the lack of the virtues described above. Even the contradictions her work gives rise to point to truth. 

hooks talks a good deal about the basic rights of children and the necessity of them having functional families, but is overall very in favor of the sexual revolution and the welfare state. hooks explains that what she didn’t receive from her “quiet, hardworking, and emotionally withholding” father, she sought in romantic relationships. While she would attribute this pattern to the “relatively new,” “privatized, patriarchal nuclear family,” it’s not hard to see the desire for healthy love modeled at home is innate. Where we may disagree on structure, we agree on principle: a culture of healthy love requires a culture of healthy families. 

hooks largely denigrates conservatives as something in service to a particular “status quo,” but she praises the love found in small, rural communities and towns. According to a Pew Research Center survey from April of this year, 60% of rural voters are Republican. If politics is downstream from culture and the culture of these places is bathed in society’s devoid virtue, the role politics plays in those communities becomes rather confusing. 

Readers do not have to agree with her means to appreciate her project: pointing to a transcendent virtue to heal temporal brokenness. hooks outlines how the cultivation of virtue will lead to a culture of love. And if Christians believe God is love, it makes sense the culmination of a perfected complex of virtue would soothe societal ills. 

The book is worth the read to expose society’s missing piece and to aid the individual’s dialectic journey to understand how it can be rediscovered. The reader is required to be discriminant, to argue with the text, and to parse out the kind of divine consciousness that allows broken logic to result in beautiful conclusions. The reader is also encouraged to think about love in a concrete way with specific components and goals, something everyone can and should contemplate. In 25 years, it’s unclear if people have gotten any better at loving one another, but the book’s relevance is staked in things transcendent regardless. 

“To return to love, to know perfect love, we surrender the will to power,” hooks says. “It is this revelation that makes the scriptures on perfect love so prophetic and revolutionary for our times. We cannot know love if we remain unable to surrender our attachment to power, if any feeling of vulnerability strikes terror in our hearts. Lovelessness torments.”