Can Isaac Forgive Abraham?

Forgiveness is an expression that befits agents who are at heart morally frail and imperfect. There is strong disagreement regarding its structure, conditions, and permissibility. Søren Kierkegaard's pseudonymously authored Fear and Trembling—already well understood as a challenge to our understanding of faith, religion, and the moral law through its focus on the biblical tale of Abraham's binding of Isaac—offers an indirect challenge to our understanding of forgiveness. Isaac is too often overlooked as characterless and philosophically uninteresting. What such a reading ignores is his potential expression for what Kierkegaard understood as forgiveness: a dutiful commitment to love equally. Rather than dispelling traditional accounts of forgiveness, Isaac's binding reveals the extent of its diverse expressions.     

Expressions of Preference and Other Morally Problematic Instances of Prayer

When considering the role of prayer in the lives of believers, most theists agree that one important effect is the psychological impact on the person who is praying. Nevertheless, the way many of us pray, by primarily or solely focusing on our welfare and the welfare of our loved ones, agitates the human tendency towards exclusion. If we take seriously God’s commandment to love the neighbor as the self, we should use prayer, instead, as a prime opportunity to help cultivate a moral character that embraces more inclusion. In this paper, I use Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love as a framework for working towards this more inclusive view of prayer—one that widens our moral circle and awareness to include all human beings, and not just the select ones we have chosen to prefer above all others. It does not follow that we are prohibited from praying for our own welfare or the welfare of our loved ones, but it does mean that using prayer in a way that only (or primarily) shows concern for those whom we prefer is morally problematic.     

Søren Kierkegaard and the Impossibility of (Un)Forgiveness

Discussions of forgiveness within Christian theology have tended to focus on the conditions in which forgiveness may be a moral or divine imperative for believers. With regard to Søren Kierkegaard’s theological ethics, this article explicates a radical perspective. For the Kierkegaardian Christian lover, no definitive relational break with the other (however objectionable) can occur. As Kierkegaard emphasizes in Works of Love, in a discourse which bears this sentiment as its title, “love abides.” Indeed, I illustrate how in three consecutive discourses in Works of Love—“VI: Love Abideth,” “VII: Mercy, a Work of Love,” and “VIII: The Victory of the Reconciliation in Love”—Kierkegaard’s ethical vision is grounded in Christian love’s immutability. For Kierkegaard, if Christian love is present, then forgiveness is redundant, and unforgiveness is impossible.     

DECEPTIVE LOVE: Kierkegaard on Mystification and Deceiving into the Truth

This article explains and assesses a particular method of loving others that is espoused by Søren Kierkegaard. In his later works, Kierkegaard advocates a kind of deceptive love whereby one mystifies or deceives another person for that other person's own good. The theological underpinning of this mode of love is found in the imitation of Christ. In other words, just as Jesus adopted an incognito, so also Christians should, at times, appear different or lowlier in order to help others by meeting them where they are. After explaining this form of love, I argue that there are considerable reasons not to follow Kierkegaard in his support of outright deception within personal relationships. I conclude with some brief reflections on whether the deceptive structure of Kierkegaard's own authorship is thereby condemned or whether it can be exonerated.     

The infant and the infinite: On psychoanalytic faith – Bion,Meltzer and Kierkegaard

This paper discusses the meaning of psychoanalytic faith as a useful developmental concept, which applies to the therapeutic process in the consulting room as to other intimate educational experiences. Faith is a concept which has been little considered in relation to psychoanalysis, partly owing to semantic confusion with ‘the Faith’ as in religious or psychoanalytic dogma, and partly owing to the difficulty of defining or describing what it is, outside accepted jargon. Yet, faith is traditionally the gateway to experiencing the unknown – a psychoanalytic goal-demanding negative capability. It is suggested that philosophy and poetry, where the concept is more familiar, can provide psychoanalytic parallels for this particular type of learning from experience. The viewpoints of Bion, Meltzer and Kierkegaard are taken as contributing to a picture of how, in the psychoanalytic session, there may be a developmental encounter between the infant (patient) and the infinite (the transference process, rather than the analyst as a person).     

FACING THREATS TO EARTHLY FELICITY

This essay offers a close reading of Fear and Trembling against the backdrop of what the author thinks are weaknesses in how the work has been interpreted by others. Some read the text allegorically, as containing a distinctively Christian message about Pauline soteriology. Others read it anagogically, with an emphasis on the moral psychology of Abraham as a human character. In partial disagreement with each, the present essay assembles and interprets the textual evidence around the threat to human happiness posed by our problematic reliance on what Aristotle calls external goods.     

Self-Deception, Confusion, and Salvation in Fear AndTrembling with Works of Love

Reading Fear and Trembling with Works of Love heightens Kierkegaard's summons to acknowledge the ambiguity of our aims and the treachery of our love. Works of Love underscores that there is aneighbor in Fear and Trembling whose justified or damnable banishment occasions Kierkegaard's attempt to track down the illusions of love. Through de Silentio, Kierkegaard prompts the reader to consider whether the promise has been broken due to radical obedience, lack of faith, dearth of imagination, or a gnarled combination of motives. We are to recognize our kinship with the duplicitous merman and discover that we must, like Tobit's Sarah, receive an extravagant gift. Fear and Trembling is thus a text with soteriological import, but with ethical import as well. Convicted by and indebted to God, we are to find in Abraham's act a premonitory paradigm for every engagement.     

EUDAIMONIA AND AGAPE IN MACINTYRE AND KIERKEGAARD'S WORKS OF LOVE

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.     

Living Sola Fide: Features of Religious Recognition

This article discusses the life of faith and forensic justification as related to some new issues in social theory, especially Axel Honneth's notions of love, respect, and esteem. The article is critical of virtue ethics and recommends an ethics of vocation as a path toward equal respect and individual social esteem. The article also discusses why Lutherans consider faith (or even faith alone) rather than love as a proper starting‐point of this path.     

Meta‐analyses of love scales: Do various love scales measure the same psychological constructs?

Abstract: Two statistical meta-analyses synthesized 33 empirical studies which investigated the correlation between relationship satisfaction and two types of love: Erotic Love and Companionate Love, measured by various love scales based on four major theories by Rubin, Lee, Hatfield, and Sternberg. The results drawn by the Hunter-Schmidt method showed that satisfaction was highly correlated with Erotic Love, but that its correlation with Companionate Love was unclear due to heterogeneity in the total sample of the all Companionate Love studies. A moderator analysis indicated a potential moderator, that is, theoretical differences between Lee's Color Theory of Love and the other three theories. The result suggested that a Companionate Love named "Storge" in the Color Theory should not be mixed up with other friendship-style loves defined by other theories as the Storge subscale would measure a different psychological construct.     

Emotions and adulterous love in 19th century Paris: The letters of Adèle Schunck and Aimé Guyet de Fernex (1824–1849)

In Paris, between 1824 and 1849, Adèle Schunck and Aimé Guyet de Fernex had an illicit relationship in perfect secrecy. This article discusses the place of emotion in the 1500 letters of the two lovers. Analysis, in their words, of the experience and epistolary expression of feelings of love and of the deep emotional turmoil that this generates, leads to describe them as characteristic figures of the Romantic rhetoric. Because of society's disapproval of their love, they are not allowed to express their emotions openly: hence, it is in Nature that the lovers find a link to their feelings.     

The Economy of the Gift: Paul Ricoeur's Significance for Theological Ethics

Paul Ricoeur's understanding of the relations of faith, love, and hope suggests a unique approach to theological ethics, one that holds fresh promise for bringing together considerations of the good (teleology) and the right (deontology) around the notion of an economy of the gift. The economy of the gift articulates Ricoeur's distinctively dialectical understanding of the relation of the human and the divine, and the resulting dialectical moral relation of the self and the other. Despite our fallen condition, Ricoeur suggests, we are called by the divine to embrace the radical possibility of the reconciliation of human goods under the requirement of accountability to human diversity and otherness.     

The Economy of the Gift: Paul Ricoeur's Significance for Theological Ethics

Paul Ricoeur's understanding of the relations of faith, love, and hope suggests a unique approach to theological ethics, one that holds fresh promise for bringing together considerations of the good (teleology) and the right (deontology) around the notion of an “economy of the gift.” The economy of the gift articulates Ricoeur's distinctively dialectical understanding of the relation of the human and the divine, and the resulting dialectical moral relation of the self and the other. Despite our fallen condition, Ricoeur suggests, we are called by the divine to embrace the radical possibility of the reconciliation of human goods under the requirement of accountability to human diversity and otherness.     

What Is Love?

SUMMARY

A theory to explain the phenomena of love is suggested. The construct of love is dissected into physiological and psychodynamic components. Love is explained first via its adaptive function, then by its physiological arousal which is interpreted as either anxiety or excitement, which is activated via goodness-of-fit of each individual's internal love model. The leap to love is contingent on the complex constellation of the above-mentioned idiosyncratic components finding synthesis within individuals and between mates. Intimacy can be nurtured, but love, similar to humans and life itself, appears to be greater than the sum of its parts.