As Artificial Intelligence researchers attempt to emulate human intelligence and transhumanists work toward superintelligence, philosophers and theologians confront a dilemma: we must either, on the one horn, (1) abandon the view that the defining feature of humanity is rationality and propose an account of spirituality that dissociates it from reason; or, on the other horn, (2) find a way to invalidate the growing faith in a posthuman future shaped by the enhancements of Intelligence Amplification (IA) or the progress of Artificial (...) Intelligence (AI). I grasp both horns of the dilemma and offer three recommendations. First, it is love understood as agape, not rational intelligence, which tells us how to live a godly life. Love tells us how to be truly human. Second, the transhumanist vision of a posthuman superintelligence is not only unrealistic, it portends the kind of tragedy we expect from a false messiah. Third, if as a byproduct of AI and IA research combined with H+ zeal the wellbeing of the human species and our planet is enhanced, we should be grateful. (shrink)

This volume explores leadership as a form of loving one’s employees, centering on the biblical concepts of Agapao and Agape. It is organized into three parts: Part 1 examines biblical principles about Agapao and Agape; Part 2 employs Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) to identify the role of love in organizational contexts; Part 3 offers case studies illustrating instances of love demonstrated by biblical figures in organizational and familial settings. Aligned with POS research, the book accentuates positive, life-giving, and (...) conditions fostering human flourishing within organizations. This scholarly endeavor contributes to advancing research in areas such as work relationships, workplace spirituality, meaningful work, and the role of leadership in improving organizational performance. (shrink)

The philosophy of loveFor centuries, popular writers and respected scholars have written about and analyzed the phenomenon of love without exhausting its potential for contemporary debate. By representing the three major traditions in the philosophy of love--Platonic eros, Christian agape, and Aristotelian philia--editor Alan Soble has not only examined the intellectual problem of what "love" is, but has designed a dialogue among the three traditions in genuine philosophical style. "Eros is acquisitive, egocentric or even selfish; agape is (...) a giving love. Eros is an unconstant, unfaithful love, while agape is unwavering and continues to give despite ingratitude. Eros is a love that responds to the merit or value of its object; while agape creates value in its object as a result of loving it... Finally, eros is an ascending love, the human's route to God; agape is a descending love, GodÆs route to humans... Philia is caught between eros and agape."--From the Introduction to Eros, Agape and Philia ISSUES EXPLORED: --What is the state of love today as seen through the eyes of Plato, Aristotle, and Paul? --How do relations between the sexes illustrate the difficulties of love? --What are the nature and effects of exclusivity, reciprocity, and constancy? --What are the conceptual and psychological ties between sex and love? --Does it make any sense to think of love in moral terms? (shrink)

Consider intense moments when you have been seized by joy or, in different contexts, by anguish for another person, or a cat or dog, or perhaps even for a squirrel or possum struck as it dashed across the road: whether glorious or haunting, these are among the most profound and meaningful moments in our lives. Agape Ethics focuses our attention on such moments with utter seriousness and argues they reveal a spiritual reality, the reality of agape. Powerful streams of modern (...) Western rationality reject the idea of agape. This has created a crisis of foundations in modern ethics and alienated us from love for all creatures. Working wholly within the bounds of reason, Agape Ethics joins an increasingly vibrant struggle to legitimate the spiritual reality of agape, to awaken people to its power, to clarify its ethical implications, and to validate our spiritual communion with all creatures in all creation. The result is a powerful, inclusive, and wholly reasonable defense of moral realism that should speak to all who are passionate about creating a maximally loving and good world. (shrink)

In Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, the protagonist Bess McNeill is often viewed as a Christ-figure, in particular, as an image of Christ’s love. In this essay, I address the feminist critique that taking Bess in this way represents a serious distortion of Christ's love, arguing that Bess need not be seen as endorsing a self-destructive and victimizing form of love that feminist critics rightly reject. Instead, I suggest that we can view her love as (...) an indictment of the institutions structuring its expression. Finally, I argue that Bess’s love for Jan combines aspects of love that have typically been segregated into eros and agape in a way that enriches our understanding of agape and prompts us in turn to re-evaluate our understanding of Christ’s love and death. (shrink)

In a provocative essay, philosopher Jeffrie G. Murphy asks: 'what would law be like if we organized it around the value of Christian love, and if we thought about and criticized law in terms of that value?'. This book brings together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to address that question. Scholars have given surprisingly little attention to assessing how the central Christian ethical category of love - agape - might impact the way we understand law. This (...) book aims to fill that gap by investigating the relationship between agape and law in Scripture, theology, and jurisprudence, as well as applying these insights to contemporary debates in criminal law, tort law, elder law, immigration law, corporate law, intellectual property, and international relations. At a time when the discourse between Christian and other world views is more likely to be filled with hate than love, the implications of agape for law are crucial. (shrink)

Love (in the agape form) forms the foundation of most leadership concepts and has been ignored in research. We respond to the debate on universal applicability of leadership forms by bringing followers into the spotlight through our examination of the interactive influence of loving (agape-based) and non-loving (non-agape-based) leadership styles and followers’ attachment dimensions (self-model and other-model) on follower outcomes. Two hundred and eighty-two business management students worked in teams on a task under the direction of leaders who demonstrated (...) agape-based behaviours and leaders who demonstrated non-agape-based behaviours in a laboratory experiment. Agape-based leadership was positively related with follower satisfaction with the leader, team commitment and perception of leaders’ effectiveness. Further, followers’ attachment dimensions (self- and other-model) moderated the relationship between agape-based leadership and follower work attitudes, such that the relationship was positive for followers with a negative self-model and for followers with a positive other-model, and the relationship was negative for followers with a negative other-model. We provide a practical set of tools for demonstrating agape leadership behaviours which are useful for educators and organizations. We suggest that leaders must alter their leadership style depending on their followers’ attachment dimensions. (shrink)

Christian ethics are usually based on a theology of love. In the case of Christian relationships to nature, Christian environmental writers have either suggested eros as a primary source for Christian love, without dealing with traditional Christian arguments against eros, or have assumed agape (spiritual love or sacrificial love) is the appropriate mode, without defining how agape should function in human relationships with the nonhuman portion of the universe. I demonstrate that God’s love for nature (...) has the same form and characteristics as God’s love for human beings, and that because agape is self-giving, it is preferable to eros in relationships with the environment. Agape concerning nature (I) is spontaneous and unmotivated, (2) is indifferent to value, (3) creates value, (4) initiates relationships with the divine, (5) recognizes individuality, (6) provides freedom, and (7) produces action and suffering. Agape might best be defined, not as Platonic ascent above the world, but as completely self-giving engagement with the world. Human love for nature is often limited by a human inability to accept love, including divine love, from nature. Flowing from God, agape cannot require reciprocity; yet agape understands what “the other has to give and can offer it complete valuation. Agape is the ideal form of human interaction with nature, because agape does not require equal status or ability, or common goals or needs. Love between humans and members of the land (or sea) community can be sacrificial, and should be distinguished by a loss of self-regard and a willingness to suffer. Further philosophical and theological discussion of the role of reciprocity and sacrifice in love for nature is highly desirable. (shrink)

The kernel of this chapter has been lodged in my mind since I was a graduate student at Fordham. As I studied the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead I was continually struck by the numerous points of conver-gence between their respective projects. Unlike other pragmatists, both of these mathematically trained philosophers were interested in constructing a specula-tive philosophy that rejected the reductive, mechanistic accounts of nature. Instead, both Peirce and Whitehead described an emergent, evolutionary cos-mos that (...) was moved by love. Given these and other deep points of conver-gence, I was, and remain, mystified by Whitehead’s nearly complete lack of discussion of his fellow mathematician’s work.1 Here is how I proceed. First I present a brief exposition of the relevant as-pects of Peirce’s and Whitehead’s systems, focusing in particular on their ac-counts of the developmental role of love. Given this backdrop, I then proceed to consider what Peirce and Whitehead might learn from each other. More specifi-cally, considering the metaphysical nature and role of both local and cosmolog-ical forms of teleology in their respective systems, I suggest that certain short-comings in each philosopher’s conception of teleology are at least partially rem-edied by the others. Finally, wanting not merely to think about, but also to think with Peirce and Whitehead, I consider what their conceptions of creative love may have to offer in contemporary debates at the frontiers of evolutionary biology. (shrink)

The Supremacy of Love advocates an agape-centered vision of virtue ethics, combining traditional Aristotelian ethics with insights from Thomas Aquinas. It shows why virtue is good for the virtuous individual, reimagines impartiality so that it is compatible with close personal relationships, and has pluralistic cross-cultural applications.

This essay explores connections and divergences between Alasdair MacIntyre's eudaimonistic ethic and Søren Kierkegaard's agapeistic ethic--perhaps the greatest proponents of these ethical paradigms from the past two centuries. The purpose of the work is threefold. First, to demonstrate an impressive amount of convergence and complementarity in their approaches to the transcendent grounds of an ethic of flourishing, the rigors necessary for a proper self-love, and the other-directed nature of proper social relations. Second, given the inapplicability of common dichotomies, to (...) pinpoint more precisely where Kierkegaard departs from eudaimonism, and where MacIntyre departs from agapeism. Finally, to show that both Kierkegaard's and MacIntyre's grounds for departure are inadequate, and thus that the most central insights of eudaimonist and agapeist ethics can be harmonized to a greater extent than either Kierkegaard's or MacIntyre's framework can allow. (shrink)

Although Anders Nygren deserves a lot of the credit for launching the debate about the Christian understanding of love, his insistence on the distinctiveness of agape has been severely challenged by advocates for the sensuousness of eros and the mutuality of philia. The most serious challenge, however, may come from defenses of agape where the altruistic distinctiveness of the theological thrust is qualified by the claims of an ethical horizon. In spite of his disservice to eros and his neglect (...) of philia, Nygren deserves to be heard in his insistence that agape is a unique concept, and that this uniqueness is due particularly to its theological source and reference. (shrink)

This interview discusses whether the concept of love can be used not only when dealing with primary relations of recognition, as in the relations of family or friendship, but also regarding social relations in civil society. The issues refer to the categorical differences between the concept of love – as developed by Honneth in his theory of recognition – and that proposed by the concept of ‘agapic action’ as a specific comprehension of love that is not (...) reducible to affective bonds, but that could be helpful in interpreting actions beyond such intimate relations. Thus, the interview discusses in which sense the concept of ‘agapic action’ can contribute to a social theory, on the one hand, distinguishing between a strict sense of love as primary affective bonds and, on the other, the concept of solidarity as social bonds. (shrink)

Based on a philosophical interpretation of the Ancient concepts, philia and agape, the present contribution offers a comparative study of the ancient Greek ethics of friendship and the Christian theology of love. While the former tradition understands philia as a finite relationship between human selves within a sociopolitical context, agape is regarded by the latter tradition as the bond of love which God grants all humans who believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah. Despite the fundamental differences between (...) the two conceptions of love, they converge at one point, namely in the caring concern for the stranger, who humans are called upon to receive in hospitality. (shrink)

This paper examines the concept of sovereign agency in Nygren’s agapic theology. I argue that Nygren’s theology is structured by a voluntarist-inspired idealization of sovereignty that in effect precludes a viable agapic theory of alterity. ‘Otherness’ plays no essential role in Nygren’s subject-centred ethic. George Grant’s profound meditations on ‘otherness’ in Technology and Justice and other late works will provide the critical perspective for my reading of Nygren and agapist theology in general.

Psychoanalysis and Christianity hold forth the promise of genuinely radical change, transforming a person so substantially such that ‘nothing remains the same’; even if the objective conditions of one’s existence stay fixed, the very lens with which the ‘born again’ subject views the world would have undergone so traumatic an upheaval that values, priorities and everything previously deemed essential would have been reimagined. It is, quite truly, a new beginning. This paper aims to insinuate a close proximity between Žižekian concepts (...) of the traumatically emergent and new vis-à-vis Biblical ideas of salvation, vocation and agape love. I also wish to demonstrate how even the Christian sacraments of baptism and the eucharist point to death and dying as their constitutive elements, with the result that sacrifice for the world becomes the main political role the Church must play. (shrink)

This study is the most comprehensive account to date of modern treatments of the love commandment. Gene Outka examines the literature on agape from Nygren's Agape and Eros in 1930. Both Roman Catholic and Protestant writings are considered, including those of D'Arcy, Niebuhr, Ramsey, Tillich, and above all, Karl Barth. The first seven chapters focus on the principal treatments in the theological literature as they relate to major topics in ethical theory. The last chapter explores further the basic normative (...) content of agape and discusses some of the most characteristic problems. "The book is in my judgment the best recent work in religious ethics. Outka brings together analytic moral philosophy and theological ethics, providing a masterly survey of views and issues arising in the past forty years.... I can think of few books of interest to scholars in both philosophy and theology, but Outka's is one. Unlike some scholars who are at home in continental theology, Outka is also at home in secular analytic philosophy; he brings them together in a mutually illuminating way."--Donald Evans "Outka has mastered this vast literature on love, and has brought a critical and clarifying analysis to bear upon it. This is a most important book on a most important subject, and brings the whole discussion into a new phase."--John Macquarrie "The first thing to be said about Outka's book quite simply is that it is excellent; in fact, it is probably the very best available book about contemporary Christian ethical theory."--The Humanities Association Review. (shrink)

Abstract.Human altruistic behavior has received a great deal of scientific attention over the past forty years. Altruistic‐like behaviors found among insects and animals have illumined certain human behaviors, and the revival of interest in group selection has focused attention on how sacrificial altruism, although not adaptive for individuals, can be adaptive for groups. Curiously, at the same time that sociobiology has placed greater emphasis on the value of sacrificial altruism, Protestant ethics in America has moved away from it. While Roman (...) Catholic ethics has a longstanding tradition emphasizing an ordering of love, placing love of self second only to love for God, Protestant ethics in America has adopted a similar stance only recently, replacing a strong sacrificial ethic with one focusing on mutual regard for self and others. If sociobiology is correct about the significance of sacrificial altruistic behaviors for the survival of communities, this shift away from sacrificial agape by American Christianity may cut the community off from important resources for the development of a global ethic crucial for the survival of that faith community and humankind itself. (shrink)

Human altruistic behavior has received a great deal of scientific attention over the past forty years. Altruistic-like behaviors found among insects and animals have illumined certain human behaviors, and the revival of interest in group selection has focused attention on how sacrificial altruism, although not adaptive for individuals, can be adaptive for groups. Curiously, at the same time that sociobiology has placed greater emphasis on the value of sacrificial altruism, Protestant ethics in America has moved away from it. While Roman (...) Catholic ethics has a longstanding tradition emphasizing an ordering of love, placing love of self second only to love for God, Protestant ethics in America has adopted a similar stance only recently, replacing a strong sacrificial ethic with one focusing on mutual regard for self and others. If sociobiology is correct about the significance of sacrificial altruistic behaviors for the survival of communities, this shift away from sacrificial agape by American Christianity may cut the community off from important resources for the development of a global ethic crucial for the survival of that faith community and humankind itself. (shrink)

This essay argues that Japan's resistance to the practice of transplanting organs from persons deemed “brain dead” may not be the result, as some claim, of that society's religions being not yet sufficiently expressive of love and altruism. The violence to the body necessary for the excision of transplantable organs seems to have been made acceptable to American Christians at a unique historical “window of opportunity” for acceptance of that new form of medical technology. Traditional reserve about corpse mutilation (...) had weakened and, especially as presented by the theologian Joseph Fletcher, organ donation was touted as both expressive of agape and a way of “updating” Christianity via the ethics of Utilitarianism. Many Japanese, largely Buddhist and Confucian in their orientation, view these changed valorizations as neither necessary nor patently more ethical than those of their own traditions. (shrink)

The role of agape in Christian ethics has been a major concern for twentieth century ethicists. In America, the dominant ethical position has stressed other-regard--often pressed to the point of significant personal sacrifice--as the content of agape. Feminist ethicists are now criticizing an exclusive emphasis on other-regard. They are stressing the need for a healthy self-regard and hence they are exploring mutuality as the most appropriate image of Christian love.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 428-435 [Access article in PDF] Agapic Friendship Sharon E. Sytsma ARISTOTLE CATEGORIZED FRIENDSHIP into three types: friendships of pleasure, friendships of utility, and complete (perfect or true) friendships (1156a5-10). 1 The thesis developed here is that Aristotle neglects an important kind of friendship. Various aspects of his theory of friendship have been challenged, but no one has charged that his categorization is incomplete. (...) 2 In what follows, an Aristotelian account of the friendship between James Steerforth and David Copperfield in Dickens' David Copperfield will be given, and then shown to be inadequate. Then a brief account of agapic love will be given and shown to be another basis of friendship—agapic friendship. Finally, the agapic nature of the two young men's friendship will be highlighted. I One might suppose that the friendship between David Copperfield and Steerforth is a mixed form of the three types of friendships identified by Aristotle. There can be no doubt that their friendship was pleasurable and useful to both. The two boys (and later young men) were appreciative of the other's pleasing appearance. David frequently comments on the pleasure attending any kind remark issuing from Steerforth on his own behalf. He admits his pleasure in being "cherished as a kind of plaything in my room," indicating his awareness of Steerforth's pleasure in being with him. Steerforth took great pleasure in David's imaginative and talented storytelling, which David eagerly [End Page 428] used as a "cementing" force in their relationship. Surely, Steerforth also took pleasure in the respect and admiration of his doting schoolmate.Also undeniable is that both friends found each other to be useful. David treasured the gift of Steerforth's protection. Being favored by Steerforth automatically elicited the admiration and envy of the other schoolboys. "No one dared to annoy one whom [Steerforth] honored with his countenance." Steerforth, on his part, found David's storytelling to be a useful antidote to his insomnia.However, David's love for Steerforth went beyond any self-interested concern. David loved Steerforth for his friend's own sake. He stayed up late and rose early to recount and embellish tales, not because he was motivated by self-interest or fear, but only because he "admired and loved him." David perceived Steerforth to be considerate and generous, and he mistook his friend's self-confidence as evidence of nobility of character.These perceptions were hardly objective. David's good nature, generous-mindedness, and youthful naiveté kept him from recognizing the faults in his friend's character, even in the face of ample evidence. Steerforth's cruel streak should have been obvious to David since he witnessed Steerforth allowing another student, the hapless Traddles, to take the blame when Steerforth laughed in church, and his ruthless exposure of Mr. Mell's secret shame of having a mother living on charity in an almshouse. He heard Steerforth's story about how he had "accidentally" thrown a hammer into Rosa Dartle's face. David's uneasiness on these occasions was overcome by his natural generosity of spirit and sense of gratitude. When shocked by a cold and arrogant insult against Little Em'ly's fiancé, Ham, David responds with full confidence: [You may] try to hide your sympathies in jest from me, but I know better. When I see how perfectly you understand them and how exquisitely you can enter into happiness like this plain fisherman's, or humour a love like my old nurse's, I know that there is not a joy or sorrow, not an emotion, of such people, that can be indifferent to you. And I admire and love you for it, Steerforth, twenty times the more! So even though David has an inflated sense of Steerforth's virtue, his thinking of Steerforth as virtuous was integral to their relationship, and that in itself would support thinking of the friendship as based on the good.Given Steerforth's defects of character, one might easily be led to the conclusion that Steerforth loved David only for the pleasure and [End Page 429] benefits of his... (shrink)

The epistemology of monotheism offered by philosophers has given inadequate attention to the kind of foundational evidence to be expected of a personal God whose moral character is ’agapeic’, or perfectly loving, toward all other agents. This article counters this deficiency with the basis of a theistic epistemology that accommodates the distinctive moral character of a God worthy of worship. It captures the widely neglected ’agonic’, or struggle-oriented, character of a God who seeks, by way of personal witness and intentional (...) action, to realize and manifest ’agape’ among humans who suffer from selfishness. In doing so, the article identifies the overlooked role of personifying evidence of God in human moral character formation. In agreement with some prominent New Testament themes, the new perspective offered ties the epistemology of monotheism to robust ’agapeic’ morality in a way that makes such epistemology ethically challenging for inquirers about God’s existence. Accordingly, s. (shrink)

Luminaries like Martin Luther King, Jr. urge that Black Americans love even those who hate them. This can look like a rejection of anger at racial injustice. We see this rejection, too, in the growing trend of characterizing social justice movements as radical hate groups, and people who get angry at injustice as bitter and unloving. Philosophers like Martha Nussbaum argue that anger is backward-looking, status focused, and retributive. Citing the life of the Prodigal Son, the victims of the (...) Charleston Church shooting, Gandhi, and King, she claims that we should choose love instead of anger – not only in our intimate relationships but also in the political realm. Buddhist monk and scholar, Śāntideva, argued that anger is an obstacle to love. Anger leads to suffering. Love frees us from suffering. All this makes an initially compelling case against anger at racial injustice. In addition, although philosophers Jeffrie Murphy and Antti Kauppinen argue that anger communicates self-respect and valuing, respectively––they make no connection between agape love and anger. In this essay I’ll show that the love King and others have in mind––agape love––is not only compatible with anger at hateful racists and complicit others, but finds valuable expression in such anger. (shrink)

Goicoechea presents his third volume in a series on agape. In this book he shows in four ways how the agape of Jesus fulfills the ahava and hesed of the Hebrew Bible. First, he shows existentially how he learned and lived this for six years in a Benedictine Minor Seminary and then for three years in a Sulpician Major Seminary. Second, he demonstrates how ahava or our love for God and neighbor and hesed or God's love for us (...) develop through the Hebrew Bible. Goicoechea argues that St. Matthew's Gospel explains the fulfilment of ahava and hesed with Jesus' agape. He concludes by drawing attention to how Levinas and Derrida, two Jewish postmodern philosophers, treat Jewish and Christian love. (shrink)

The concepts of love and business do not seem to match very well, despite attempts to operationalize love as agape or neighborly love. In line with the emerging literature, this contribution uses a profane and analytical approach to agape as an ‘Agenda for Growth and Affirmation of People and the Environment’. Within this agenda we define agape as ‘the commitment to the well-being and flourishing of others’ and operationalized it to measure the concept in a substantial sample (...) of 420 medium-sized and large companies in The Netherlands. At the core of the research lies the question whether and to what extent companies, represented by senior managers and members of the works council, are committed to the well-being of their employees. This article analyses the concept of agape and its application in a business context and presents the results of a survey. The results show that, on average, respondents report that their organization is committed to employees’ well-being in line with the organization’s values. Though not the aim of agape, since organizations that apply the concept reap tangible business benefits from it, the concept becomes suitable to a wider range of businesses. (shrink)

Most philosophers believe that for a moral principle to be valid one must be able to allow others to follow the same principle. There is a question whether the principle of "agape" which enjoins placing the good of others above one's own can meet this test. The author argues that a qualified form of agapism can meet this test, and that the test in fact provides a means of arriving at an acceptable form of the ethics of love. It (...) also provides a way of justifying some of the qualifications that some agapists have placed on the love principle. (shrink)

Despite the commonality of moral injury (MI) across diverse work settings, it has received limited attention within business and management research, and such research has tended to focus upon post-injury moral repair or recovery, rather than on primary prevention. Additionally, despite the relational and spiritual dimensions and harms of MI, there has been limited attention to relational-spiritual perspectives for its prevention. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to elucidate the relational and spiritual dimensions of MI, and identify the potential (...) of a relevant, related perspective for the primary prevention of MI within organizational settings, namely that of agape. First, an overview of the nature and types of MI is provided, including discussion of its relational and spiritual dimensions and harms. Second, Gilligan’s (Gilligan, Journal of Social Philosophy 45:89–106, 2014; Gilligan and Snider Gilligan and Snider, Why does patriarchy persist?, Polity, New York, 2018) care ethics framework for understanding MI as an outcome of relational and spiritual violation involving the fear-based betrayal of love is described. Third, given this conceptualization of MI as a fear-based betrayal of love, consideration is given to the potential of agape as a form of spiritual love for the prevention of MI within organizations. This includes consideration of three interrelated areas: intentional cultivation of an agapeic organizational culture; the development of an agapeic organizational conscience; and, agapeic responsiveness to healthy and health-sustaining, politically aware and engaged forms of relational resistance against potentially morally injurious events. Directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Although recent scholarship in diverse professional areas shows an ongoing interest in the application of agape - the New Testament's term for the highest order of self-giving love - no published work has made an in-depth exploration of agape in relation to journalism. This article explores what agape can contribute to media theory and practice. After explaining what distinguishes agape from other concepts of altruism and how agape can complement other approaches to compassion or minimizing harm, the analysis turns (...) to three questions raised by applying agape to mainstream journalism: (a) Does agape have a place for self-interest? (b) What does agape imply for notions of journalistic neutrality? (c) Can agape speak to journalists who don't accept its religious roots? Agape provides a test case for the application of religiously based ethical perspectives to journalism. (shrink)

In two previous articles I have examined the presence of elements related to love and sex in rhetorical manuals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and compared such elements with similar material in a number of literary texts of the same period. The relationship between the two kinds of texts appears to be closer than would be expected solely on the grounds that they were written in an age interested in both eros and rhetoric, and I have suggested that (...) the relationship is symbiotic. In the present discussion I wish to enlarge upon this subject and pursue further than hitherto a particular vehicle of eros in the literature of the period, the oxymoron, especially the oxymoron in chiastic form. The main witnesses called will be a chronological sequence of three rhetorical manuals culminating in Gervase of Melkley's Ars poetica, several of the medieval Latin Pyramus and Thisbe poems, and finally, one of the most complex and sophisticated treatments of eros of its day, Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan. The time frame set by these texts is ca. 1140–1215. (shrink)

“Whoever does not love abides in death,” writes John in his first epistle (1Jn 3:10). This statement presents us with a paradox. Death, so we suppose, is precisely that in which one cannot 'abide.' Our first thought is to interpret this as metaphor. John is saying that a life devoid of love is a life somehow like death. But, having never died, how do we know what death is like? My paper explores these questions with the aid of (...) two philosophical interpretations of the meaning of death: Heidegger’s in Being and Time and Kierkegaard’s in The Sickness Unto Death. Having looked at these I then seek to grasp their relation to the Christian idea of agapic love as presented by John. (shrink)

The underlying idea presented in this book is that there are similarities as well as differences between Confucianism as Humanistic tradition and Christianity ...

Children as learners need adults who love them, even when the children are unable to give anything in return. Furthermore, adults should be able to make wise judgements concerning what is good for the children. The clarification of these principles and of their educational import has to start within our own cultural tradition. Agape (unconditional love, neighbour-love or charity) is a basic concept in the Christian tradition. Phronesis (moral wisdom, practical judgement or prudence) has a key position (...) in the Aristotelian tradition. In his Summa TheologiaeThomas Aquinas has combined these traditions and ethical concepts, with agape (in Latin caritas) as the commanding concept. The article will explore some key challenges and productive resources revealed by this combination for today's education and upbringing. (shrink)