Christian Love as the Principle of Christian Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 291-301
Keyword(s):  
Christian Life ◽  
Christian Love

Cultivating Christian Love

2021 ◽  
pp. 191-210
Author(s):  
Adam C. Pelser
Keyword(s):  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Christian Love

In his “Great Commandments” Jesus places love at the heart of the virtuous Christian life. Yet, the task of trying to cultivate Christian love might seem impossible from the start. For, a prominent Christian tradition understands love (charity) to be a gracious gift from God, not a virtue we can acquire through practice. Moreover, love seems to involve emotions that are outside of our control. In response to these worries, Pelser explains how it is possible to work toward the cultivation of Christian love, even though it is an infused, emotional virtue. He develops Søren Kierkegaard’s insight that Christians can contribute to the cultivation of love in one another’s hearts by “presupposing” love in each other. Pelser concludes by explaining how certain practices that combine loving action with contemplative reflection can help till the ground of our hearts so that love might be cultivated in us by God and others.

Kenotic Gestures

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 198-218
Author(s):  
Michelle Voss Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Gender Norms ◽  
Spiritual Practice ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Christian Love ◽  
Love Of God ◽  
Shed Light

Christians sometimes take Christ's ken?sis, or self-emptying, as the pattern for Christian love of God and neighbor. Feminist critics suspect that this model reinforces unhealthy gender norms and oppressive power structures and contest the nature and extent of this template. Interreligious study can shed light on the debate. The Gau??ya Vai??ava tradition employs the categories of Indian aesthetic theory to explain how types of loving devotion (bhakti rasa) toward Krishna are evoked and expressed. The subordinate and peaceful modes of love for Krishna can serve as a heuristic for understanding Sarah Coakley's and Cynthia Bourgeault's retrievals of ken?sis in spiritual practice. A comparative reading suggests that objections to Coakley's version, which resembles the subordinate love of God, are more intractable due to the rootedness of its aesthetic in oppressive human experiences, while Bourgeault's reclamation of ken?sis aligns with a peaceful or meditative mode of love that feminists may more readily appreciate.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Life On Earth

This conclusion offers a brief commentary on the implications of song, resurrection, and belief for the broader history of the Reformation. It relates the various uses of song by Lutherans (hymn pamphlets), Anabaptists (martyr songs), Dutch Reformed exiles (psalms), and Catholics (motets) to these confessions’ ideas of belief as it concerned resurrection and their understandings of how belief was bound up with the Christian life on earth. In place of a story of the transformation of one conception of Christianity to many different conceptions, this book as a whole suggests that the Reformation might be reconceived as a much more elemental debate about the role that belief was to play in a Christian life.

Minds, Machines, and Giving a Damn

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Chodat
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Walker Percy ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Partial Success ◽  
The Way

The 1960s saw the triumph of cognitive science over behaviorism. This chapter examines three literary–philosophical objections to this shift: “West Coast” phenomenology, Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, and the writings of Walker Percy, the first of the postwar sages featured in this book. For “West Coast” philosophers, cognitive science ignores the way human action is structured by what we “give a damn” about—a sense of significance that orients our actions. Powers’s novel goes a step further: no more than machines do we know what to give a damn about. Percy’s essays and fiction challenge both these positions, asking us to see analogies between the significance we find in language and the significance we find in living a Christian life. Establishing such an analogy is the goal of Percy’s 1971 Love in the Ruins, which seeks to embody—with only partial success—what terms such as “faith” and “community” might mean.

Intellectual Humility and the Practices of Faith

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant Macaskill
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Intellectual Humility ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
The New Testament

This chapter examines the practices with which intellectual humility is enmeshed in the Christian life: patience and gratitude, which are both manifested in prayer. The discussion recognizes that intellectual humility does not function in isolation, as a virtue in its own right, but is expressed through, and fed by, other practices within the life of faith, as the minds of believers are rightly ordered with respect to God. Patience and gratitude are not represented within the New Testament simply as dispositions, but as deliberate volitional activities, by which the lordship and the goodness of God are acknowledged and behaviours modified accordingly. The chapter traces the key ways in which faithful servants are represented as ‘waiting upon God’ and giving thanks to him, and considers the ways that that these practices are represented as bearing on the epistemic and volitional characteristics of those servants.

A Rhetorics of the Word

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Political Discourse ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Communications Technology ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Call And Response ◽  
Hermann Broch ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact

A Rhetorics of the Word is the second volume of a three-part philosophy of Christian life. It approaches Christian life as expressive of a divine calling or vocation. The word Church (ekklesia) and the role of naming in baptism indicate the fundamental place of calling in Christian life. However, ideas of vocation are difficult to access in a world shaped by the experience of disenchantment. The difficulties of articulating vocation are explored with reference to Weber, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard. These are further connected to a general crisis of language, manifesting in the degradation of political discourse (Arendt) and the impact of new communications technology on human discourse. This impact can be seen as reinforcing an occlusion of language in favour of rationality already evidenced in the philosophical tradition and technocratic management. New possibilities for thinking vocation are pursued through the biblical prophets (with emphasis on Buber’s and Rosenzweig’s reinterpretation of the call of Moses), Saint John, and Russian philosophies of language (Florensky to Bakhtin). Vocation emerges as bound up with the possibility of being name-bearers, enabling a mutuality of call and response. This is then evidenced further in ethics and poetics, where Levinas and Hermann Broch (The Death of Virgil) become major points of reference. In conclusion, the themes of calling and the name are seen to shape the possibility of love—the subject of the final part of the philosophy of Christian life: A Metaphysics of Love.

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