Can Love really transform the world? Where did Martin Luther King Jr. get his ideas about beloved community? What are the boundaries of a community and who has the power to police those boundaries? What are our responsibilities to our communities and ourselves? What makes a community ideal or beloved and how might this ideal on ethical grounds be achieved, contested, revised, or completely discarded? This course introduces a widely-used but often misunderstood ethical concept of Beloved Community. Students will consider the concept’s roots in the work of late 19th-century thinker Josiah Royce and its development in the thought of 20th century civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Finally, students will bring the concept to bear on their self-understanding as ethical agents in a University context and further explore it in relation to contemporary social, political, economic, and ecological challenges.