Love and Christian Ethics

At the heart of Christian ethics is the biblical commandment to love God and to love one's neighbor as oneself. But what is the meaning of love? Does love require self-sacrifice? Does it involve eros, or sexual desire? Or is love an enlightened form of friendship? Scholars have wrestled with these questions since the recording of the Christian gospels, and in recent decades teachers and students of Christian ethics have engaged in vigorous debates about appropriate interpretations and implications of this critical norm. Simmons and Sorrells have assembled a who's who in the field of Christian ethics--including Lisa Cahill, Stephen Pope, Cathy Kaveny, Ron Green, Margaret Farley, John Kelsay, Emilie Townes, Ed Vacek, and Mark Jordan, among many others--to analyze and assess love from a variety of perspectives. The anthology includes three parts: Tradition, addressing biblical issues and great thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas and Kant and Kierkegaard; Theory, focusing on various meanings of love; and Society, exploring an array of contemporary concerns such as law and health care and sex and religious pluralism. Gene Outka, author of the seminal book, Agape, An Ethical Analysis, provides an afterword on future trajectories for this research.