Cherished Belonging

The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times

by Gregory Boyle

Review posted December 6, 2025.
Avid Reader Press (Simon & Schuster), 2024. 212 pages.
Review written December 2, 2025, from my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com.
Starred Review

If you haven't yet read one of Fr. Gregory Boyle's books, I strongly recommend that you do so as soon as possible. You will be encouraged and inspired. If you have read the others, you will be as happy as I am that a new one is out.

Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit priest who works with gang members and former gang members in downtown Los Angeles (not far from where I used to live when I was in grad school at UCLA). In this book, as in his others, he tells stories of the beloved people he works with - and how their lives are transformed by having a place where they belong and where they are truly cherished.

This book challenged me. Fr. Boyle truly believes that everyone is unshakably good. That evil is a manifestation of illness, un-wholeness. And he believes that God sees us all that way, too. And seeing as God sees transforms our way of being with people.

We are invited to love what God loves, which is quite different from doing things that please God.

All his stories show the power of cherishing one another.

The moral quest has never kept us moral; it's just kept us from each other. So maybe we should abandon the moral quest, since it's an Old World map, and embrace instead the journey to wholeness, flourishing love, and defiant joy.... Yes, we want to do the next right thing, but what is the next right thing and who is able to choose it? Only the healthy person can. So we help each other, not to make better choices but to walk home to well-being and deeper growth in love. Cherishing leads us to this warm embrace of the journey to wholeness.

I promise that reading this book will uplift your spirit. I marked a few dozen quotations to post on my Sonderquotes blog. (It will take a long time, since I'm marking quotes more quickly than I'm posting them, but that will give me a chance to revisit this book for a long time to come.) Let me close this review with another good one:

The goal is not to save our soul but to spend it. Our authentic discipleship, then, is to grow in love, not goodness. Growth is not about becoming less sinful, but more joyful.