Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship

ISBN-13: 9780226307527 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 434 str.

Eric Gregory

Opis

Augustine for all of his influence on Western culture and politics was hardly a liberal. Drawing from theology, feminist theory, and political philosophy, Eric Gregory offers here a liberal ethics of citizenship, one less susceptible to anti-liberal critics because it is informed by the Augustinian tradition. The result is a book that expands Augustinian imaginations for liberalism and liberal imaginations for Augustinianism.
Gregory examines a broad range of Augustine s texts and their reception in different disciplines and identifies two classical themes which have analogues in secular political theory: love and related notions of care, solidarity, and sympathy and sin as well as related notions of cruelty, evil, and narrow self-interest. From an Augustinian point of view, Gregory argues, love and sin constrain each other in ways that yield a distinctive vision of the limits and possibilities of politics.
In providing a constructive argument for Christian participation in liberal democratic societies, Gregory advances efforts to revive a political theology in which love s relation to justice is prominent. "Politics and the Order of Love "will provoke new conversations for those interested in Christian ethics, moral psychology, and the role of religion in a liberal society."