What is love?

This week in my sophomore oral classes we are discussing the movie "Remember the Titans" and focusing on overcoming prejudice and working together as a team, without putting issues of race, ethnicity, and other differences between us. Next Monday I will be doing a lecture for the English department on the influence of worldview on culture, examining how open dialogue with people of different worldviews fosters real communication and better love for each other. It dares us to ask important life questions and see if our own worldview can answer these. In some of my research for class and the lecture, I came across this quote by Frederich Buechner:

"The love of equals is a human thing- of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles.
The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing- the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.
The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing- to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.
And then there is love for the enemy- love for one who does not love you, but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world."

Think about such things.