Self Love and Christian Ethics

In this book, Darlene Fozard Weaver challenges contemporary culture's promotion of self-realization and argues for proper self love.

Darlene Fozard Weaver (Author)

9780521817813, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 October 2002

282 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.9 cm, 0.442 kg

"This book provides very refreshing and illuminating perspective on many issues, as Weaver carefully brings out the insights of hermeneutical theories to the crowded and confused field of Christian discourse on love." Journal of Religion

Self love is an inescapable problem for ethics, yet much of contemporary ethics is reluctant to offer any normative moral anthropologies. Instead, secular ethics and contemporary culture promote a norm of self-realization which is subjective and uncritical. Christian ethics also fails to address this problem directly, because it tends to investigate self love within the context of conflicts between the self's interests and those of her neighbors. Self Love and Christian Ethics argues for right self love as the solution of proper self-relation that intersects with love for God and love for neighbor. Darlene Fozard Weaver explains that right self love entails a true self-understanding that is embodied in the person's concrete acts and relations. In making this argument, she calls upon ethicists to revisit ontological accounts of the self and to devote more attention to particular moral acts.

1. The contemporary problem of self love
2. Self love in Christian ethics
3. A hermeneutical account of self-relation
4. Right self love
5. Self love and moral action
6. Self love, religion and morality.

Subject Areas: Christian theology [HRCM], Philosophy [HP]