Work toward ecumenical liturgical convergence may be traced back to at least 1910; however, this project thesis expands upon the concept of full, active, and conscious participation in worship found in the 1963 Second Ecumenical Vatican Council’s Sacrosanctum Concilium to illumine how shaping the worship practices of the Church can make our communities of faith inclusive of all sexual orientations and gender expressions. This thesis presents the design of a curriculum for worship leaders to reflect upon the worship practices of these local context, and move from their current state to a place where all members of the beloved community are valued.

Feminist epistemologists have often argued that our relationships with structures of power shape the content, expression, and social force of what we know. While feminist standpoint theorists have often maintained that experiences on the margins of social power can lead to better understandings of the roles of systems of oppression in society, more recent writings on epistemologies of ignorance examine the reverse, how experiences from positions of social power limit our understandings. In this project, I draw on the concept of epistemic privilege as it has been formulated by feminist standpoint theorists, criticisms of objectivity and fixed, transcendent truths, and analyses of the relationships between structures of power and concepts of knowing. By considering the works of Sandra Harding, Lorraine Code, and Patricia Hill Collins, among others, I argue that knowledge is situational and contingent and that some individuals possess privileged understandings due to their positions on the margins of power structures. However, I also argue that, in order for feminist epistemology to utilize the concept of epistemic privilege successfully, it must incorporate a concept of error into its considerations of constructions of knowledge. Thus, throughout this dissertation, I examine how a concept of error could bolster efforts to subvert the dominant approaches to knowledge that have upheld male privilege and undermine the patriarchal power structures that rely on them. I propose a form of feminist inquiry that incorporates a method of error sensitivity, which will enable inquirers to recognize when institutions of power, individual limitations, and cultural myths are restricting knowing subjects' perspectives and leading them to commit errors. This concept of error, and the related approach to error-sensitive inquiry, relies upon a commitment to continuous and ever-expanding inquiry by a community, rather than an isolated individual. Thus, I derive much of my conceptual framework from the work of Josiah Royce and his concepts of the Beloved Community, loyalty to loyalty, and communities of interpretation.

This thesis examines the theological and practical functioning of American Baptist Women’s Ministries, American Baptist Churches USA, as it has engaged in a “Becoming Beloved Community” initiative. It argues that theological grounding in a vision of Beloved Community is a necessary missing element in transforming the way the organization pursues its mission. Since 2014, the organization has conducted a cultural audit, assessing attitudes and readiness, and it has developed some strategies and tactics as a result. However, without a solid theological grounding and a deeper understanding of what adhering to a vision of beloved community may mean in terms of structure and decision-making processes, these strategies and tactics are less effective than they could be. This thesis draws upon the writings of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr., on process theology, and on woman’s liberation theologies to assess current practices in AB Women’s Ministries and provide a more robust theological grounding for the concept of “Becoming Beloved Community.” In constructing the theological grounding, a list of marks of beloved community is developed and used as an evaluative tool for current practices in the organization. Using adaptive leadership theory and complexity leadership theory, the thesis also develops recommendations for the future.

Informed by archival data and oral history interviews, this dissertation explored stories of the lived experiences of the stakeholders of Mercer University’s Beloved Community. The goal was to gain insight into how higher educational institutions (HEIs) engaged community partners to address long-term racial injury through the process of racial reconciliation. This study included the insights of 18 participants in a racial reconciliation project named the Beloved Community; which began in 2005 and was sponsored by Mercer University, a private higher educational institution; formerly affiliated with the Georgia Baptist Convention. An aim of the project was to sustain a frank discourse within a safe, public forum, that would address the present and past injuries of racial segregation at the local church level and include the injured in problem solving. Mercer is one of few formerly segregated southern universities engaged in such an endeavor. The research questions were: 1) What do Mercer University’s Beloved Community stakeholders perceive as the primary goals of higher educational institutions in addressing racial reconciliation? 2) What are Mercer University’s Beloved Community stakeholders’ perceptions and lived experiences of racial reconciliation, through this project? 3) What patterns and contradictions are there in the stakeholders’ stories about their perceptions and lived experiences of racial reconciliation? The findings validate the research of Androff (2012) that reconciliation is a slow process, occurring at multiple levels, and provides insights into such an endeavor at a local level. Further, this study found that enactment of the project is influenced by social identity, collective memory, and intergroup interaction. A culture of social reconciliation, in the form of building interpersonal relationships and creating forums for racial dialogue, was the dominant form of reconciliation found within Mercer’s Beloved Community. This study is significant in examining the role of HEIs who include community partners to extend sustained scholarship, learning, and civic engagement.

Unitarian Universalism has arrived at an historic inflection point that calls it to an overarching purpose of helping to bring about the Beloved Community in the wider world while dismantling racism and other systemic oppressions in its members and institutions. For most UU congregations the former is a familiar goal that compels social justice work, but transforming themselves seems a bewildering and daunting goal. This mixed method study of six UU congregations and 50 of their leaders proposes a support structure for congregations on this journey to help them change their institutional leadership practices and foster spiritual vitality in all their members.