Love,duty and burden: Mothers' and daughters' engagements with familial obligations

The proliferation of transnational migration has attracted scholars from diverse disciplines to investigate the experiences of migrants from different cultures. While cultural anthropologists are trained to understand the subjects' emic perspectives, other social scientists who grapple with cultural diversity tend towards applying an etic analytical lens, without deeper engagement with given cultural logics. In order to fully overcome the conceptual marginalisation of cultures in our discussion of family relationships and intimacy, cultural specificities need to be more thoroughly taken into account. This article adds to the discussion of diverse forms of culturally specific intimacy by exploring familial obligations undertaken by Tongan female migrants and their second-generation daughters in Australia. Ethnographic case studies examine their emotions in relation to love and the feelings of burden and duty in practices of the creation and maintenance of intimate relationships both in proximity and at a distance. Deep engagements with Tongan cultural concepts and their emic viewpoints enable this article to challenge the simplistic view that envisages first generation migrants as ‘traditional’ and their daughters as more ‘Westernised’ or ‘individualised’ along the scale of individualisation.     

Loving People for Who They Are (Even When They Don't Love You Back)

The debate on love's reasons ignores unrequited love, which—I argue—can be as genuine and as valuable as reciprocated love. I start by showing that the relationship view of love cannot account for either the reasons or the value of unrequited love. I then present the simple property view, an alternative to the relationship view that is beset with its own problems. In order to solve these problems, I present a more sophisticated version of the property view that integrates ideas from different property theorists in the love literature. However, even this more sophisticated property view falls short in accounting for unrequited love's reasons. In response, I develop a new version of the property view that I call the experiential view. On this view, we love a person not only in virtue of properties shaped by and experienced in a reciprocal loving relationship, but also in virtue of perspectival properties, whose value can be properly assessed also outside of a reciprocal loving relationship. The experiential view is the only view that can account not only for reciprocated love's reasons, but also for unrequited love's reasons.     

Persons and Properties: A Sartrean Perspective on Love's Object

It is often said that to love someone we must love her for her own sake. But what does this mean? Various answers have been offered up by philosophers. Alan Soble's ‘aggregate’ view of identity focuses on properties of the beloved as key to understanding love's basis and, in a less direct way, its object. This view does not give us a clear distinction between persons and properties. David Velleman's view makes this distinction more clearly but creates a gap between properties and personhood. Jean‐Paul Sartre's view which emphasizes embodiment, addresses the main deficiencies of both of these former views.     

Paul Tillich and Pitirim A. Sorokin on Love

An analysis of Paul Tillich's three‐volume Systematic Theology and Pitirim A. Sorokin's The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation reveals how a metaphysical dialogue on God and love contributes to scientific and theological scholarship on altruism. This article focuses on similarities and differences in Tillich and Sorokin. Similarities include a belief in the importance of the ontological/love connection and the conclusion that a special state, ecstasy, is integral to the experience of genuine love. Differences serve to complement rather than negate. For example, Tillich's recognition that ecstatic connections with the divine within finitude are fragmentary balances Sorokin's view that these ecstatic peaks are reached only by the few. The similarities give resonance and point to the overall creation, while the differences often serve as counterpoint to balance the ideas of the scientist and the theologian.     

Love Between Embodiment and Spirituality: Jean‐Luc Marion and John Paul II on Erotic Love

While theological discourse on love traditionally bifurcates between love as a body‐bound passion and its superior and disembodied spiritual counterpart, a growing number of accounts have recently challenged the traditional division arguing for the fundamental unity of the phenomenon of love. Could such a dichotomy be overcome if one reversed the conventional hierarchy between bodily erotic and intellectual agapeic love and made erotic love between man and woman the fundamental paradigm of all kinds of loves? Could the reversal recuperate the affective aspect that has traditionally been downplayed? An answer to these questions is explored through an imaginary dialogue between Jean‐Luc Marion's phenomenology of one‐way erotic love and John Paul II's theology of embodied love.     

British women's experiences of drinking alcohol: Dynamics of emotional proximity and distance

Research on alcohol consumption suggests that friendship and peer relations are highly influential and have a decisive impact on drinking behaviours. Further, that women's friendships appear to be characterised by emotional disclosure and ‘knowing’ one another. In this paper I draw on debates around emotional intimacy, ideas of ‘closeness’ and ‘distance’ to explore how this might work when young women go out and drink alcohol. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 25 British undergraduate female students aged 18–25, this research suggests that one of the compelling appeals of alcohol is that it creates a ‘space of suspension’, whereby feelings of being both close and distant (intimate proximity) coexist, often for strategic reasons associated with security. Two themes emerged from the data: firstly that the young women had a preference for paradoxically maintaining ‘distance’ alongside ‘closeness’ with friends, and secondly, that contingencies of safety and vulnerability promoted the need for co-operation to manage risk in the night-time economy. These themes permeated relationships and became a significant dynamic in group behaviour creating a tension between functionality and friendship. This paper contributes to a growing body of work that suggests intimacy and women's friendships are complex: traditional conceptions about young women seeking intimate and close friendships need revaluating to take into consideration how ‘distance’ within groups is both desirable and negotiated, and may be facilitated through the drinking of alcohol.     

Love Troubles: Human Attachment and Biomedical Enhancements

In fascinating recent work, Julian Savulescu and his various co‐authors argue that human love is one of the things we can improve upon using biomedical enhancements. Is that so? This article first notes that Savulescu and his co‐authors mainly treat love as a means to various other goods. Love, however, is widely regarded as an intrinsic good. To investigate whether enhancements can produce the distinctive intrinsic good of love, this article does three things. Drawing on Philip Pettit's recent discussion of ‘robustly demanding goods’, it asks what exactly we intrinsically desire in seeking love; it considers four possible outcomes involving attachment‐enhancements and attachments; and it considers two different pieces of news we might receive about our lovers' attachment to us (that it is, or that it is not, sustained with the help of enhancement‐technologies). Enhancement‐sustained attachment, it is concluded, is less desirable than the intrinsic good of love.     

‘The Extremely Difficult Realization That Something Other Than Oneself Is Real’: Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency

Abstract: In the last few years, there has been a revival of interest in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Despite this revival, however, certain aspects of Murdoch's views remain poorly understood, including her account of a concept that she famously described as ‘central’ to moral philosophy—i.e., love. In this paper, I argue that the concept of love is essential to any adequate understanding of Murdoch's work but that recent attempts by Kieran Setiya and David Velleman to assimilate Murdoch's account of love to neo‐Aristotelian or neo‐Kantian theories of moral agency are misconceived. We will not understand what Murdoch is trying to do unless we understand her position as a radical alternative to such theories. Here, I present a reading of Murdoch's account of love as a form of Platonic eros directed toward two objects: the Good and the particular individual. It is in navigating the tension between these two objects that we find ourselves facing what Murdoch famously described as ‘the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real’. When properly understood, Murdoch's account of love opens up conceptual space for an alternative approach to some of the central questions in contemporary moral theory.     

Love and the need for comprehension

The question of how well we need to be known, to be loved, is considered. A ‘second-person’ model is argued for, on which love requires that the beloved's demands to be known be respected. This puts pressure on the idea that lovers need to make a beloved's interests their own, taking that to require comprehension of the beloved's interests: a lover would have to appreciate the normative intelligibility and motivating force of an interest. The possibility of love with failure of comprehension is defended, using illustrations from Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead.     

Deconstructing the Linearity of Grace: The Risk and Reflexive Paradox of Mary's Immaculate Fiat

Abstract: Beginning from Pope Pius IX's doctrinal definition in Ineffabilis Deus, this article explores the circular paradox of the Virgin Mary's immaculate fiat. Fully contingent on Christ's work of reconciliation (and ‘immaculate’ by virtue of it), Mary's fiat paradoxically precedes that work and consents to it. The article suggests that this circularity is integral to the intimate bond that unites Mary's fiat to the Son's kenosis on the cross. Her fiat thus points the way of redeemed creation into the reflexivity of God's own intra‐trinitarian communication. Mary is hereby read as ‘the way to prayer’, the ‘epiphany’ of the Holy Spirit (as Alexander Schmemann names her) who cries ‘Abba, Father’ on behalf of those who do not know how to pray.     

Why Theological Hermeneutics Needs Rhetoric: Augustine's De doctrina Christiana

To define theological interpretation, this article appeals to Augustine's De doctrina christiana. The article argues against the claim that De doctrina is a rhetorical handbook and asserts instead that the treatise can best be described as an ‘expanded hermeneutics’, that is, a hermeneutics that includes rhetoric. The discussion highlights that rhetoric is defined loosely as ‘communication’: the focus is on the target audience, not the mode of delivery. De doctrina is put into dialogue with a contemporary proponent of theological interpretation, Stephen Fowl, to highlight its distinctiveness. The article concludes that the paradigm for theological interpretation is the sermon.     

Mozart Among the Theologians

The essay compares and contrasts the philosophical, theological, and aesthetic approaches to Mozart in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard's aesthete A (Either/Or, I), Karl Barth (primarily Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), and Hans Küng (Mozart: Traces of Transcendence). Whereas Kierkegaard's A outlines a non‐religious ‘daemonic Mozart’, Barth and Küng depict two contrasting theological understandings of Mozart's music. Barth's Mozart reflects a Reformed aesthetic, with Mozart as a ‘parable’ of gospel, whereas Küng's Mozart reflects a Roman Catholic ‘sacramental’ vision of music and religious faith. The essay explores how these different visions of Mozart are shaped by both their theological and aesthetic commitments.     

LOVE,JUSTICE, AND SOCIAL ESCHATOLOGY

In this paper, we explore the ontological and theological ground of political institutions in order to then reflect upon the eschatological calling of society. The paper builds on Tillich's ontological insight that love does not simply transcend justice, but that it permeates and drives justice, that justice gives form to love's reunion of the separated. This relation between love and justice is at play in political institutions: these unite human beings under forms of justice that must be transformed ever anew if they are not to lose touch with the dynamic power of love and freeze into increasingly unjust juridicalism. The modern history of Western civilisation bears witness to this ontological tension, and the phenomenon of globalisation is yet another instance of human society's mystical calling. Thus, love heads the dynamic movement that transforms political institutions ever anew. Yet society as a whole must become conscious of its ontology for humanity to truly reach its eschatological potential, and this will require both that theology recovers its ground and that political theory thinks theologically.     

How Does a Loving God Punish? On the Unification of God's Love and Punitive Wrath

There are two influential and opposing theological paradigms concerning the relationship between God's love and punitive wrath. According to the first paradigm, which is here labelled the ‘divergent account’, God may sometimes punish an individual in a manner that is opposed to his love. Alternatively, there is the ‘unitary account’, according to which God's punitive wrath is an expression of love that seeks the creature's good. In the present article, an argument for the unitary account is provided, and a fresh way of understanding God's punishment therein is considered. The article proceeds as follows. In the first section, a dominant motivation for the divergent account is distilled through an examination of the writings of Emil Brunner. This motivation is then rejected and the unitary account is defended in the next section, in light of the New Testament ethic of love. In the third section, the work of Gregory of Nyssa and the contemporary philosopher R.A. Duff is utilized to develop a communicative theory of God's punishment, which illuminates and fortifies the unitary account. In the final section, the unitary account, together with the communicative theory of divine punishment, is applied to the doctrine of hell.     

The public good that does the public good: A new reading of Mohism

Mohism has long been misrepresented. Mo‐tzu is usually called a utilitarian because he preached a universal love that must benefit. Yet Mencius, who pined the Confucian way of virtue (humaneness and righteousness) against Mo‐tzu's way of benefit, basically borrowed Mo‐tzu's thesis: that the root cause of chaos is this lack of love—except Mencius renamed it the desire for personal benefit. Yet Mo‐tzu only championed ‘benefit’ to head off its opposite, ‘harm’, specifically the harm done by Confucians who with good intent (love) perpetuated rites that did people more harm than good. Mo‐tzu wanted his universal love to be the public good that would actually do the public good (i.e. benefit the collective). And he derived this from Confucius’ teaching of ‘Love (all) men’ and his Golden Rule: Render not what others would not desire. No man desires harm. As a critic of Confucian rites (especially the prolonged funeral), Mo‐tzu worked to replace the blind custom of rites with his rational measure of ‘rightness’: what is right must do good (i.e. benefit the intended recipient). It is not true that Mohists were ‘joyless’ ascetics; they would gladly celebrate a good harvest with wine and folk song—not expensive court music—with the people. Since Mohist discourse is ‘public’ (that is, accountable), it is also only proper that what is ‘right’ should be outer (means‐end efficacy) and not inner as Mencius would insist.     

THE MEDIEVAL AFFECTIVE DIONYSIAN TRADITION

Thomas Gallus is often credited with introducing an affective innovation in medieval reception of Dionysius. While desire is not absent from the CD, no form of human affectivity plays an explicit role in Moses’ ascent to union with God in the darkness of unknowing, as described in the MT. With Gallus, however, after all knowledge fails, union occurs through love. This innovation was influential, shaping subsequent interpretations of the CD, such as The Cloud of Unknowing. Yet, the subtle interplay of love and knowledge and the complex conception of love's own cognition of God in Gallus’ theology were not generally retained by those whom he influenced.     

Competing Accounts of Progress: The Redemptive Purpose of Memory in J.B. Metz and Theodor Adorno

What unifies the accounts of history and progress presented by Adorno's Critical Theory and Metz's political theology? I show: (i) that both resist the ‘magic spell’ of an Enlightenment totality on whose strength the violent excesses of modernity have been built; (ii) that both accomplish this resistance by memory of victims or the ‘losers of history’; and (iii) that both hold out hope for the possibility of progress in time. However, the two accounts differ in important ways. These differences stem from: (i) the transference of historical subjectivity from homo emancipator to the God of Jesus’ passion; (ii) the role of the ‘eschatological proviso’ in guaranteeing theological futuricity; and (iii) the fullness of Metz's eschatological justice as compared to Adorno's conception of progress as the mere ‘avoidance of catastrophe’. This project brings the work of one of the most influential social critics of the twentieth century into dialogue with that of a politically engaged theologian of the same historical‐cultural context. In doing so, I hope to suggest the theological richness of Metz's approach but also the significant contributions of dialectical criticism to the practice of theology in the modern era.     

Syzygy: Love Made Strange

Abstract : This paper argues that there can be an intimate, non‐marital loving communion between two persons or, sometimes, two groups. The Christian tradition has its own concept, syzygy, for such love. An awareness of this forgotten tradition may be valuable in discussing some broader problems in the church, such as rivalry between different parties or homosexuality. The syzygic relationship of love and rivalry is characteristic of some well‐known biblical and mythological narratives.