Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love

Author(s):  
Ina Linge
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Natalia Marandiuc

The question of what home means and how it relates to subjectivity has fresh urgency in light of pervasive contemporary migration, which ruptures the human self, and painful relational poverty, which characterizes much of modern life. Yet the Augustinian heritage that situates true home and right attachment outside this world has clouded theological conceptualizations of earthly belonging. This book engages this neglected topic and argues for the goodness of home, which it construes relationally rather than spatially. In dialogue with research in the neuroscience of attachment theory and contemporary constructions of the self, the book advances a theological argument for the function of love attachments as sources of subjectivity and enablers of human freedom. The book shows that paradoxically the depth of human belonging—thus, dependence—is directly proportional to the strength of human agency—hence, independence. Building on Søren Kierkegaard’s imagery alongside other sources, the book depicts human love as interwoven with the infinite streams of divine love, forming a sacramental site for God’s presence, and playing a constitutive role in the making of the self. The book portrays the self both as gifted from God in inchoate form and as engaged in continuous, albeit nonlinear becoming via experiences of human love. The Holy Spirit indwells the attachment space between human beings as a middle term preventing its implosion or dissolution and conferring a stability that befits the concept of home. The interstitial space between loving human persons subsists both anthropologically and pneumatologically and generates the self’s home.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Magdalena Figueroa

Reading each letter, each comma and each verse of this collection of poems is an explosion of feelings. It is a journey through the deepest reflection of human love and pain. From the first poem to the last letter, the reader embarks on a journey to infinity; that which is the internal universe. Ultimately, there is no more exquisite way than to spill your soul, mind and heart on one page. And it is what the poet does in this extensive collection of poems.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 53-107
Author(s):  
William C. Chittick

Abstract It is increasingly difficult after Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) to differentiate the aims of the Sufis from those of the philosophers. Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1050/1640) offers a fine example of a thinker who synthesized the Sufi and philosophical methodologies in his voluminous writings. In Arrivers in the Heart he combines the precision of philosophical reasoning with the recognition (maʿrifa) of God and self that was central to the concerns of the Sufi teachers. In forty “effusions” (fayḍ) of mostly rhymed prose, he provides epitomes of many of the themes that he addresses in his long books. These include the concept and reality of existence, the Divine Essence and Attributes, God’s omniscience, theodicy, eschatology, the worlds of the cosmos, spiritual psychology, divine and human love, disciplining the soul, and the nature of human perfection.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 153-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Aronberg Lavin

By the end of the thirteenth century, the Church of Rome defined human marriage as incomplete before consummation in virtuous carnal intercourse. This article focuses on Cimabue’s emotionally charged and sexually explicit fresco representation of the Assumption of the Virgin, and shows that its stylistic verisimilitude makes visible human love as proof of the spiritual miracle of the Mystic Marriage of Christ and Maria-Ecclesia.


Author(s):  
Lev I. Titlin ◽  

The article deals with the problem of translation of some Sanskrit, English and German philosophical terms found in the article of Austrian indologist G. Ober­hammer “The Forgotten Secret of Human Love. An Attempt of an Approach”, which is devoted to the phenomenon of human love in India of the ancient and medieval period in such texts as Kāmasūtra of Vātsyāyana, Sātvatasaṃhitā, Nyāyabhāṣya of Pakṣilasvāmin, Śaraṇāgatigadya of Rāmānuja, etc. (translation of the article is attached below). At the beginning of the article, brief information on Oberhammer and the study of his creative heritage in Russia is provided. In particular, such Sanskrit terms as “śṛṅgāra” (erotic mood), “kāma” (sexual de­sire), the English term “rest”, the German “Rest” are considered. The author poses the following questions: is it possible to translate the word “kāma” as “love”, “śṛṅgāra” (erotische Stimmungen) – as erotic mood, whether to translate the Eng­lish “rest” as “peace”, or as “remainder”: and replies that, basing on contextual use, for “kāma” it is better to use the translation “desire” (“sexual desire”) or leave the Sanskrit term as it is, as Oberhammer does for the most part, “erotic mood”, to be more precise, means “erotic feeling”, not “mood” and the English “rest” clearly means “the remainder”, more specifically – the abandonment of oneself to God. The author concludes that for the correct translation of English terms in articles devoted to Indological problems, it is necessary to refer directly to Sanskrit terms, in the case of translated articles, we must also check the text against the original language, and for translation of Sanskrit terms we should use specialized dictionaries, referring to cases of contextual use of that terms.


Love Divine ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 9-38
Author(s):  
Jordan Wessling

Chapter 1 is methodological and sets the stage for many of the modes of reasoning found within the remainder of the book. The central argument is that reflection upon ideal human love can be used as a reliable source for gaining significant insight into the nature of God’s love. More specifically, reasons are presented for believing that various New Testament authors presuppose that divine and human love (or species of each) are similar in such a way that scrutiny of how humans ideally should love can be used fruitfully to inform how Christian theologians and philosophers think of God’s perfect love. This methodological conclusion provides a foundation for the construction of a model of God’s love found in Chapter 2, and it offers the beginnings of a more general framework for considering certain kinds of actions relevant to this book that God might, or might not, be inclined to perform.


Author(s):  
Strachan Donnelley

This chapter presents a reading of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago that brings out the philosophy that permeates the work and compares it with the philosophical cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead. Whereas Whitehead wears his speculative cosmology on his sleeve, Pasternak cloaks his philosophy in his art, in his characters and their conversations, and in the imaginative world he creates. The dramatic and relational focus of the novel is “life in others,” which means that life essentially involves both worldly activity and worldly “suffering,” or undergoing. This is behind the bewildering interconnections and mutual influences of Doctor Zhivago’s characters. The mutual penetration and real connection of lives, each in the other, is the backbone of the novel, undergirding its tragic vision. Doctor Zhivago is the story of individual, interconnected lives crucifying and resurrecting one another, again and again. The final ingredient of Pasternak’s cosmic harmony, without which we cannot fully understand the interrelations of life, death, form, and art, is eros, love. Pasternak’s cosmological vision is that individuals are essentially involved with one another and with the universe abroad. Life renews itself out of death, and human love and creative activity are the truest and fullest expressions of cosmic reality.


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