Beloved Community

During her keynote remarks at the 2018 MLK Convocation, Bernice A. King, daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke movingly of her father’s vision of a beloved community. It was a moment of inspiration and vision for Providence College. Since then, we have adopted this language to describe the community we aspire to become. 

At Providence College, the beloved community is a just community, ordered by and towards love, and animated by the spirit of Christ in its pursuit of truth.  

Beloved Community Document

Justice

What do we owe one another?

In the Beloved Community, justice is both a personal virtue and an institutional responsibility. It calls us to rightly order our relationships by giving each person what they are due, not as an act of generosity, but because of their inherent dignity and our responsibility to one another. 

Justice begins by asking: What does this person and our community rightly deserve in order to flourish? In other words, what is due to them? 

At Providence College, this can include: 

• Safety and dignity in how we speak to, treat, and care for one another. 

• Fair and equitable policies and practices that recognize the dignity of every person. 

• Meaningful access to the goods of our community including education, learning, employment, and, when appropriate, housing and food. 

• Attention to barriers or circumstances that may prevent individuals or groups from fully participating and flourishing. 

Building the Beloved Community asks us to develop the habit of seeing what is due to others, acting accordingly, and working together to create a community whose relationships, practices, and structures reflect the dignity of all. 

Love

How do we will the good of one another?

In the Beloved Community, love begins with justice, but does not end there. Justice gives others what they are due. Love goes further: it asks what we are willing to give of ourselves for the good and flourishing of another. 

Love cannot exist if we don’t first have justice. We cannot claim to love someone while denying their dignity, rights, safety, or what is rightly due to them. Love elevates justice by moving us beyond obligation toward generosity, mercy, forgiveness, relationship, and communion. 

At Providence College, living with love can look like: 

• Learning someone’s name and taking the time to remember it. 

• Asking rather than assuming about another person or their experience. 

• Listening to understand, especially across differences. 

• Acknowledging impact and repairing harm, even when harm was not our intention. 

• Choosing curiosity and accompaniment over judgment or isolation. 

• Actively seeking the good of others, even when doing so requires something of us. 

Love is more than being nice and asks more than “What do I owe you?” Love means willing to ask, “What can I give of myself for your good?” This is how the Beloved Community moves beyond simply living alongside one another toward genuine relationships and become a community where we take responsibility not only for respecting one another’s dignity, but for actively seeking one another’s good. 

Truth

To be a beloved community here at Providence College where our mission is our motto: veritas, where we are founded on the pursuit of truth, calls us to believe that our pursuit of truth is intrinsically connected to how we care, support, and protect one another. At a Catholic and Dominican college, the pursuit of truth is never separated from the dignity of the people with whom we seek it. How we encounter, listen to, challenge, and care for one another is part of our pursuit of Veritas. 

Truth does not require us to avoid disagreement or difference. Instead, it calls us to engage them with mutual respect, sincere dialogue, intellectual humility, and a willingness to learn. We trust that God is at work in our midst and that unity is possible.  

At Providence College, living in truth can look like: 

• Speaking truthfully and responsibly about others, both publicly and privately. 

• Listening to understand, recognizing that our own knowledge and perspective are always limited. 

• Engaging disagreement with curiosity and humility, rather than seeking simply to win. 

• Challenging assumptions, including our own and being willing to change when we learn something new. 

• Protecting the dignity and rights of others even amid significant disagreement. 

• Remaining in relationship across difference, seeking greater understanding rather than retreating into division. 

Building the Beloved Community means becoming a community held together by our shared pursuit of truth: one where difference can deepen understanding, dialogue can strengthen relationship, and every person is supported in the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and flourishing.