Love in a Time of Crisis

Welcome to issue 13, September 2022, of Pari Perspectives, which explores the topic of Love in a Time of Crisis.

In May of this year we ran an online series of eight sessions entitled ‘Love in the Time of Crisis.’ The planning had started some months previously and we had been toying with the idea of using a famous song title such as ‘What’s Love Got to do With It? ’or ‘All You Need Is Love’ as the name for the series. And then, on February 24, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This event, following on the heels of the pandemic, led us instead to borrow our title from Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera and so it became ‘Love in the Time of Crisis: From Separation to Interbeing.’

We asked permission of the presenters in the series to transcribe their presentations and seven of these you will find in this issue. In addition we have included four other contributions on the topic of love.

We were once again fortunate to have poet, Richard Berengarten, as part of this series. Richard opened each session with an introduction and reading of a poem from one of his many collections. We have used these poems and his preambles in our ‘More Perspectives’ section of this issue.

We hope this issue of Pari Perspectives will go some way to enlightening us all on the subject of ‘something so amorphous, baffling, painful and ennobling as Love’ as Todd Bureau puts it. And as we started with song titles, we’ll end with Cole Porter’s unfathomable question ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’