Overcoming Lust With Dante’s “Divine Comedy”
“Midway along the journey of our life / I woke to find myself in a dark wood, / for I had wandered off from the straight path.”[1]…
Made in Italy: A Poem
There is this room. There are the paintings, Family photographs standing in their frames, Sofas, cushions – books, magazines, coasters On the table – the little Italian…
God Makes Marriages: Reflections on My Anniversary
Thursday, January 20th, was the 23rd anniversary of the day Jerry and I got married. In rabbinic tradition, God makes marriages. In fact, that would be the…
Love and Communication
Love and Communication. Paddy Scannell. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2021. Paddy Scannell’s new thought-provoking book is a sort of intellectual and scholarly testament. He even suggests…
Love and Other Conversions
Sometimes individuals change not only their belief systems but their deepest selves and life orientations. Conversion, in the empirical sense, usually refers to a person’s newfound acceptance…
Saint Jane Austen
Among the realist tradition of writing, I must profess a great fondness for Russian realism. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Pasternak strike me as having produced a great corpus…
Plato and Love
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and all your soul. And your neighbor as yourself. This is the first and…
The Music of Love
I am not actually a child of the Sixties, although I almost was. Born in July 1959, I had a fairly contented, provincial Scottish boyhood when all…
Heroes of Love
The Iliad and the Odyssey are heroic poems that have endured through the millennia. The primary subjects of the Iliad and Odyssey are Achilles and Odysseus, though much…
Process and the Derailing of Reality: Erotic Theology (Part VI)
In part five of this essay we looked closely at the forgotten early modern Platonic thinkers Giordano Bruno, Ralph Cudworth and Anne Conway and their theories of…
Process and the Derailing of Reality: Love and Violence (Part V)
In this fifth part of the essay I would like to consider what a Platonic speculative realism might tell us about Eros – desire in all its…
Niklas Luhmann’s Love: A Sketch
Love: A Sketch. Niklas Luhmann. Polity, 2010. In 1969, a German sociologist named Niklas Luhmann delivered a lecture at Bielefeld University in the year of its…
Philosopher of Love: David L. Schindler
For the orthodox Christian, is doing one’s public duty more or less reducible to voting for the most socially conservative Republican on the ballot—and then shutting up…
Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth
Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. D.C. Schindler. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018. Love and the Postmodern Predicament aims…
Augustine on Love, Justice, and Pluralism in Human Nature
Justice is an integral theme in Augustine’s political theology, and justice is directly correlated and contingent upon his theology of love. True justice, for Augustine, begins with…