The Arrow

We believe that the more that we sense we are held in a field of care, or love, the more that empowers our courage and our capacity to act. This is the spirit with which we invite contributions to the next issue in our elemental series, Like Fire, on themes of love, compassion, community, and political action.

While we remain committed to love as an engine and anchor of spiritual activism, we realize that love as practice can seem soft, naive, bypass-y, and even unobtainable. In the face of increasing state violence, ongoing genocide, and the collapse of life-sustaining systems, love may also seem insufficient for the task.

We are interested in taking both of these lines of inquiry seriously. How is love an engine of spiritual activism and how do we deepen in it? What have we learned through being well loved? How do we learn to love without (and in spite of) wounding? How do we love through difference? How do we learn to love powerfully, transformatively, and confrontingly? And how do we bring our love to bear politically?

We invite contributions from practitioners, scholars, and activists that explore the following topics and related themes:

🔥methods for deepening in love, compassion, and care and tools for working through blocks or distortions to love and compassion

🔥the paradoxical nature of fire as an element that can be generative and sustaining or consumptive and destructive

🔥loving through and across difference by building mutuality and the ability to recover trust

🔥cultural conditions contributing to loneliness, social disconnection, and relational avoidance and their political implications

🔥”social” media, AI, and social (dis)connection

🔥love as a political practice and tool of social transformation

🔥love, accountability, justice, and healing

We are also interested in poetry and other artistic reflections on love and compassion, as well as timely political pieces on the politics of fire. We also accept book reviews on themes related to each special issue.

Submissions are open through September 30. Visit our website for more information.