ABSTRACT
There is a poignant dissonance within the hymn from which the title of this paper is derived: “They will know we are Christians by our love.” Written in 1968 by Chicago Parish Priest Peter R. Scholtes, one can hardly miss the irony. Scholtes, marked by a tradition that reveres religious power and priestly piety, suggests “love” as the outward sign which most aptly demonstrates this group identity. Yet it is not the regalia of the pontiff or the sacraments at the altar, but love as unity, cooperation, and in-group team building that permeates each refrain of Scholtes’ melodic vision. However, there are no instructions in these lyrics regarding what to do when one reaches the liminal edge of Scholtes’ in-group perimeter. Whether the dynamics of love or power win out when identity collides with difference is unclear. The choir is naked it seems, without the cover of any ideological garments when encountering the multiplicity that lurks outside the group’s edge. English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead locates the creative unfolding of life at these edges, where multiplicities collide and, although he left no record of hymn writing to help subsequent generations navigate this precarious borderland, there is much about power and love to be gleaned from his considerable writings. In Whitehead’s process worldview, every event in space-time uniquely creates itself from the past it inherits, always constituted and affected by an array of relationships – from a historical multiplicity – and contributing its own becoming to the future of manifold possibilities. To paraphrase Whitehead, the many become one and are increased by that one.1
