Love As Common Ground

Paul S. Fiddes

doi:10.5771/9781793647818

Summary

This book explores the way in which the study and practice of love creates a common ground for different faiths and different traditions within the same faith. For the contributors, “common ground” in this context is not a minimal core of belief or a lowest common denominator of faith, but a space or area in which to live together, consider together the meaning of the love to which various faiths witness, and work together to enable human flourishing. Such a space, the contributors believe, is possible because it is the place of encounter with the divine. This book is the fruit of a Project for the Study of Love in Religion which aims to create this space in which different traditions of love converge, from Islam, Judaism, and the Christianity of both East and West. Tools employed by the contributors in exploring this space of love include exegesis of ancient texts, theology, accounts of mystical experience, philosophy, and evolutionary science of the human. Insights about human and divine love that emerge include its nature as a form of knowing, its sacrificial and erotic dimensions, its inclination towards beauty, its making of community and its importance for a just political and economic life.

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Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2021
ISBN-Print: 978-1-7936-4780-1
ISBN-Online: 978-1-7936-4781-8
Publisher: Lexington, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 344
Product type: Edited Book

1. Contents No access
2. 1. Editor’s Note No access
  2. Notes No access
1. All You Need Is Love? No access
2. The Analogy of Love No access
3. A Disanalogy of Love? No access
4. The Analogy of Knowledge No access
5. Is Love God? No access
6. Love as Knowing and the Trinity No access
7. Love and Practical Knowledge No access
8. Notes No access
9. Bibliography No access
1. 1. Divine Love No access
  2. Human Love No access
  3. The Nature of Love No access
  4. Beauty and the Beloved No access
  5. Notes No access
  6. Bibliography No access
2. 1. The Divine Source of Love No access
  2. The Movement from Impure Love to Eternal Love No access
  3. Love and the Stages of the Self No access
  4. The Journeys of Love and Self-realization No access
  5. Notes No access
  6. Bibliography No access
3. 1. The Feminine in the Mystical Traditions of Islam and Christianity No access
  2. Sufi Women’s Tawhid (Oneness) of Love No access
  3. The Sanctity of Bridal Mysticism and Erotic Imagery No access
  4. Conclusion No access
  5. Notes No access
  6. Bibliography No access
1. 1. The Practical Commandment to Love No access
  2. The Universality of Love No access
  3. Yiḥud No access
  4. Ahavah No access
  5. The Messianic Coming of Love No access
  6. Notes No access
  7. Bibliography No access
2. 1. Androgynous Adam in Rabbinic Interpretation No access
  2. Divine and Human Androgyne in Mystical Reading No access
  3. Midrash and Zohar on Genesis 2 No access
  4. Outside the Garden of Eden No access
  5. The Union of Harmonious Love No access
  6. Notes No access
  7. Bibliography No access
3. 1. Divine Love as a Model for Human Love? No access
  2. Human and Divine Agency No access
  3. Trinitarian Relationality as a Model for Human Relationality? No access
  4. Welcoming the Divine Other, Welcoming the Human Other No access
  5. Conclusion No access
  6. Notes No access
  7. Bibliography No access
1. 1. Byzantine Love in Modern Context No access
  2. Love as a Human Practice: Four Antinomies of Love No access
  3. Transfiguring Love: the Dimension of Knowing No access
  4. Love and Personhood No access
  5. Love and Historicity No access
  6. Conclusion No access
  7. Notes No access
  8. Bibliography No access
2. 1. Introduction No access
  2. ‘Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth’ No access
  3. ‘Enter with your whole being through the door of his side’ No access
  4. ‘Amor ipse intellectus est’: ‘love itself is knowledge’ No access
  5. Conclusion: Narcissus Revisited No access
  6. Notes No access
  7. Bibliography No access
3. 1. Defining Self-Sacrifice No access
  2. An Anthropology of Intersubjectivity No access
  3. Self-Sacrifice as a Humanizing Force No access
  4. Limiting Self-Sacrifice No access
  5. Sacrifice and Self-Love No access
  6. Conclusions No access
  7. Notes No access
  8. Bibliography No access
1. 1. Preliminaries: Desire and Other-Worldliness No access
  2. Desire and Cognition: Some Questionable Dualisms No access
  3. Desire as Cognition No access
  4. Platonic Desire and Egoism No access
  5. Moving Ahead No access
  6. Notes No access
  7. Bibliography No access
2. 1. Aristotle on Substance No access
  2. Aristotle on Friendship-Love (Philia) No access
  3. Love and Individual Substances No access
  4. Notes No access
  5. Bibliography No access
1. 1. Approaches to Love in the Christian West No access
  2. Love and Common Ground No access
  3. Notes No access
  4. Bibliography No access
2. 1. Theory of Practice No access
  2. The Science of Practices No access
  3. Interdisciplinarity and Practices No access
  4. Understanding Freedom No access
  5. Technology and the Practice of Love No access
  6. Notes No access
  7. Bibliography No access
3. 1. Situating and Contextualizing No access
  2. Delineating the Contours of Love No access
  3. The Embodied Forms and Structures of Love in the Social, Political, and Economic Realms No access
  4. Capitalism, Socialism, and the Challenge of Love in Economics and Politics No access
  5. Divine Love, Erotic Love, and Socio-Political Love No access
  6. Notes No access
  7. Bibliography No access
Index No access Pages 333 - 340
About the Contributors No access Pages 341 - 344