Academic literature on the topic 'Agape. Love'

This essay evaluates Jean-Luc Marion’s claim in The Erotic Phenomenon that eros and agape are “two names selected among an infinity of others in order to think and to say the one love” (221). I will defend his attempt to unite agape and eros against Jacques Derrida’s claim that we must love without any desire for reciprocity. Additionally, I will indicate what implications Marion’s account of love has for a discussion of love and its reasons. Marion correctly identifies the paradox at the heart of love: that in order to truly love, I must give up my demand for assurance, although I may still maintain the hope that another will love me. While Marion offers an important corrective to Derrida’s account of pure agape, I will argue that his account of love that includes both eros and agape ultimately resembles Derrida’s pure agape too closely because Marion does not sufficiently acknowledge the role of reciprocity in love.

This article examines the central role and importance of “love” in 1 John, with a particular focus on the concept of agape love. This letter is one of the writings in the New Testament which raises the theme of love in the context of Christians' relationship with God and each other. In this commentary, we explain the meaning, characteristics, and implications of agape love found in 1 John. This research aims to reveal that agape love is not only the foundation of Christian faith, but also plays an important role in shaping the character and ethics of Christian life. We will present key quotes from 1 John that illustrate the message of agape love and discuss how these principles can be applied in contemporary Christian life. The results of this research can provide a deeper understanding of the meaning and value of agape love in the context of this letter and inspire thinking about how to live it in everyday life as a Christian.

Love is a keystone in Franz Rosenzweig’s philosophy, which reaffirmed Judaism’s emphasis on vital, relational love. What “love” exactly means, however, is controversial. In the Christian context, love is often denoted by Agape—which implies (1) that “God is Love”, (2) that love is universal, impartial, and rather endorses the sinner; and (3) that humans should practice and emulate such love. The ultimate expression of Agape is the commandment to love one’s enemy, which is rooted in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:44). This essay considers Rosenzweig’s understanding of Agape, at the implicit level (since the coining by Anders Nygren of Christian love as “Agape” became widespread only after Rosenzweig’s death). This essay opens by contextualizing Rosenzweig within political theology, in particular vis-à-vis Schmitt. Secondly, it considers Rosenzweig’s approach to Agape in the sense of divine love, and in the sense of the love of enemy. Concerning divine love, Rosenzweig criticized theological Agapism (‘God is love’) which equates God with love, and hence makes love into a dogma or noun, rather than an action or verb, thus depriving divinity’s personal loving agency. Concerning the agapic love of enemy, Rosenzweig discredits its Christian version (for being imperialistic), and advocates its Jewish version of accepting divine judgement. His surprising advocacy of the love of enemies may result from Rosenzweig’s opposition to Gnosticism, which excludes the ‘good God’ from involvement in the physical world. The essay’s conclusion reflects on the role of Agape and its pragmatist versions in the post-secular world of the 21st century and conveys Rosenzweig’s pragmatist contribution in this regard, of recognizing the significance of worldliness and togetherness.

Coelho’s popular `The Alchemist` is not a novel on the roles of men and women and it is not making any statement about mundane love except talking about a mystical Universal love. But it does say about love being one of the most important and valuable treasures that can be found. The other novels are equally mystical leaning much on Erosand Agape. Rather they try to show the inner lanes of agape. This is a brief attempt to show the author’s experience of agape is not only universal but also personal.

This research investigated the relationship between the six love styles based on Lee's theory (1973) and several romantic experiences, such as emotional experiences, self-perceptions, and partner's impressions. The subjects were 343 undergraduate students. The main results were as follows: Eros was positively related to positive feelings and positive self-perceptions. Mania and Agape showed similar patterns of emotional experiences, but Agape was distinguished from Mania in that agapic individuals thought of themselves as kind in romantic relationships. Pragma and Ludus were positively related to negative feelings in romantic relationships, and, in addition, Ludus was negatively correlated with partner's attractiveness. These results mostly provided support for Lee's theory and the conceptual validity of the six love styles.

In his seminal work The Mind and the Heart of Love. A Study in Eros and Agape, Martin d’Arcy shows that self-sacrificial love (agape) and desire (eros) express the mystery of selfhood. Using the method of phenomenology, he demonstrates that eros and agape encompass a range of affectations, emotions and existential modes. All these make sense when seen as stages in the process of self-giving. Thus, eros and agape do not pertain to two opposing aspects of the soul. Rather, they are modes of manifestation of the entire person. In answering to the agapeic love of God, human agapeic love comes to a state which reason cannot grasp. At this point the erotic impulse steps in in order for the human soul to take the path of unknowing. Through this interplay the true hierarchy of being is perceived and the human person enters into loving exchange with the world. This happens within a three-tier process of loving knowledge whose structure is similar to the model of self-knowledge developed in the early Byzantine theological compendium Corpus dionysiacum.

AbstractIn this article, the thought of the late Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, is considered as a resource for a contemporary environmental ethic. Tillich's ontology of love is revisited through the filter of the present global ecological crisis as a way of clarifying the various relationships that exist among the different forms of love. The paper concludes by going beyond Tillich's usage of agape love strictly as a form of love between human persons to include the non-human community within the orbit of humanity's unconditional concern for the 'other', that is, toward an ethic of 'bio-agape'.

This article explores the theme of love and the political in the thought of Hannah Arendt by examining her attitude toward such kinds of love as eros, philia, agape, cupiditas, caritas, compassio, fraternitas. Arendt generally regards love as unpolitical because of its inherent inclination to exclude the outside world. But she has shown a sustained interest in the relationship between love and the political. Arendt's concern for love is dictated by her search for a new, public, and artificial vinculum—or bond. This public bond, what Arendt calls amor mundi, is basically grounded in the notion of political friendship. I argue that amor mundi would be of more relevance, if it included not only political friendship but an element of eros as the craving for the durable world as well as two strands of agape—love of forgiveness and an enlarged neighborly love.

In Works of Love (Kjerlighedens Gjerninger) Søren Kierkegaard contrasts two seemingly opposing forms of love. One, "preferential" love, primarily includes the love found in friendships and romances. The other, "non-preferential" or "neighbor love," is associated with Christian agape love. Some interpreters believe Kierkegaard's clear support of neighbor love as the "higher" form of love reveals an incompatibility between preferential relationships, like friendship, and universal Christian love. This reading imagines an "either/or" in which a person is forced to choose between Christian faith on one hand, and friendship/erotic love on the other. The objective of this paper is to argue against such an interpretation and to demonstrate that preferential love understood in the context of neighbor love is endorsed by Kierkegaard himself. A comparison of his thought to that of Robert O. Johann and an analysis both the social and religious context in which Works of Love was written will shed light on the rhetorical strategies at work and reveal the nature of the love that Kierkegaard promotes.

Thesis (M.C.S.)--Regent College, 1993.
Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-158). Includes Glossary of Chinese characters and bibliography of Chinese references.

Adolescents and youth are big consumers of the internet. Today, what we call online social media, such as social network sites (SNS), blogs, etc. are an important part of young people's life (Pujazon-zazik, Park 2010). Youth are increasingly utilizing these communicative tools to support or to enhance their "offline" relations (Subrahmanyam, Greenfield, 2008; Livingstone 2010). The author's research focuses on a field that is very much neglected by the Italian sociological studies, aiming to understand the current state of the youth culture in relationship to the internet and sexuality. The work seeks to understand how young italians today use the internet to gain and access information (visual images, discussions, discourses) about sexual and intimate life and activities; to understand 'how' and 'why' they use (or choose not to use) this particular medium, and what kind of social impact can be observed in this relatively new phenomenon. The research seek (1) to understand what multimedia platform young Italian use to have access to information and discourses connected to sexuality; (2) to understand why they use (or don't use) this media; (3) to define the extent of Internet on the youth's experience on sexuality and their social construction; (4) to understand the definition of previously points to eventually rough out differences between boys and girls understanding how gender difference could be constructed in the Internet. Everything avoiding to the oversimplifying labels of the Internet as either an entirely dangerous or entirely safe space . With this research, the author wants to draw an attention to the problematic relationships between the "real" and "virtual", between the everyday life experience that contain also what someone define "virtual" life experience, an experience mediated by the social and cognitive space where the absence of the body plays a paradoxical roll in their (self-learning) education of sexuality and construction of identity. The research is based on a qualitative approach and, more specifically, on participatory approach with focus groups, interviews and on-line focus groups with adolescents from 16 years old to 18 years old. The main results of the research show an interesting panorama where the Internet goes to be integrated into everyday life with the classic agents of socialization (School, family, friends) in different ways depending on the dialogue that in the other places is permitted to adolescents. For the interviewed the Internet becomes important because it allows to cope with embarrassment, fear of the "firsts times" (first sexual intercourse, first kiss, etc.), curiosity, etc. Internet, overall with SNS, becomes an important part of the construction of identity of adolescents that with online resources try to "play" and define which Erving Goffman (1963) called social identity and personal identity. Everything goes to a specific direction: what the girls and the boys interviewed define "normality": a standardized idea of the gender roles and of the identity, something that "jump" in the "online" and "offline" spaces as a unique region without borders.
Gli adolescenti sono grandi consumatori della rete. Oggi, quelli che vengono definiti social media, come ad esempio i social network sites (SNS), i blogs, etc., sono un’importante parte della vite dei ragazzi (Pujazon-zazik, Park 2010). Essi utilizzano in modo crescente questi tools comunicativi per ampliare le reti sociali che costruiscono fuori dagli spazi digitali (Subrahmanyam, Greenfield, 2008; Livingstone 2010). La ricerca si è voluta concentrare su un campo di studi che è ancora poco esplorato dalle analisi sociologiche, allo scopo di comprendere la cultura giovanile in relazione ad internet e all’intimità. Il lavoro ha cercato di comprendere come i ragazzi oggi utilizzano le risorse che il web mette loro a disposizione per avere accesso a informazioni e pratiche connesse alla sessualità e all’affettività. Ciò con il fine di definire che tipo di impatto sociale può avere l’utilizzo della rete; per capire ‘come’ e ‘perché’ gli adolescenti utilizzano (o non utilizzano) questo particolare medium e cogliere il senso che essi danno ai loro comportamenti L’analisi qui proposta vuole chiarire il portato delle nuove tecnologie di comunicazione digitale nei processi di costruzione dell’esperienza e della realtà sociale, e nella definizione dei rapporti tra i generi e tra le generazioni, la ricerca si è posta nello specifico gli obiettivi che seguono: (1) conoscere quali sono le piattaforme multimediali (on-line) alle quali gli adolescenti si rivolgono per accedere a informazioni e discorsi legati alla sessualità e definire che tipo d’informazioni e discorsi cercano; (2) capire quali sono le dimensioni di senso che spingono ad approcciarsi (o meno) a tali mezzi; (3) definire il portato di queste piattaforme nella più grande e composita dimensione esperienziale giovanile legata alla sessualità, all0identità e alla sua costruzione sociale; (4) comprendere la definizione dei tre punti precedenti per delineare eventuali differenze tra ragazze e ragazzi ed interpretare il modo in cui le differenze di genere possono essere gestite anche in rete. Tutto evitando di etichettare, semplificando, la rete come uno spazio estremamente pericoloso o, al contrario, privo di rischi. La ricerca ha voluto focalizzare l’attenzione sulla relazione problematica tra “reale” e “virtuale”, tra vita quotidiana e vita quotidiana mediatizzata in cui l’assenza del corpo gioca un ruolo paradossale in quella che è la socializzazione alla sessualità e la costruzione dell’identità. Per raggiungere questi obiettivi il lavoro empirico ha coinvolto adolescenti con età compresa tra i 16 e i 18 anni rendendoli partecipi nel processo di costruzione della ricerca attraverso quelli che abbiamo definite gruppi di co-costruzione. A questa fase ne è seguita una seconda – di approfondimento qualitativo – che ha visto ragazze e ragazzi prendere parte a interviste discorsive e focus groups online. I risultati principali della ricerca mostrano un interessante panorama in cui internet viene integrato nella vita quotidiana degli adolescenti e si affianca alle classiche agenzie di socializzazione. La rete diviene per i ragazzi – con le dovute differenze e con forme partecipative diversificate – un importante supporto che li aiuta soprattutto nel combattere l’ansia connessa alle “prime volte”, ad assolvere le curiosità che si vergognano a esplicitare e ad avere accesso ad un più ampio ventaglio di rappresentazioni e discorsi sessuali. Soprattutto attraverso i SNS la rete diventa per gli adolescenti un banco di prova attraverso il quale testare e costruire la propria identità, pubblica e privata, non solo all’interno degli spazi digitali. Tutto ciò nel nome della definizione di una “normalità” utile a non sentirsi esclusi e che il web può aiutare a comprendere e valutare. Online e offline si ridefiniscono quindi conformandosi come territori comunicanti e facenti entrambi attivamente parte della vita degli adolescenti, delle esperienze e delle emozioni che a essa appartengono.

AbstractPhilosophers have solid analyses of defective understandings of the human condition and regularly propose inspirational alternatives that would seem to have the promise of changing the fortunes and fate of our species. But philosophers sometimes over-generalize in their criticisms, attributing to a vast cultural complex a specific anthropological understanding when in fact any large culture plays host to a large variety of mutually inconsistent anthropological visions. Moreover, philosophers rarely demonstrate that a culture-level change in anthropological understandings would have the effects they claim and they virtually never spell out a theory of change by which such a culture-level transformation could ever be realized. This paper begins in philosophical anthropology, spelling out two specific problematic aspects of contemporary western human self-understanding: individualism and cognitive error; two corresponding correctives: relationality and self-awareness; and two spiritual translations of these corrective measures: love as agape and karuna and wisdom as knowledge and humility. The argument then transitions to practical questions about what differences the envisaged transformation in ideas about human nature might be expected to make on socioeconomic conditions and how such changes might be implemented to realize the envisaged changes. The conclusion is that the anthropological insights of philosophers would be best served by a partnership with education and policy experts that would add realism about the conditions for social change to the generative creativity of philosophical analysis.