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Power and Christian Ethics
註釋In the conventional analysis of human behaviour, power and ethics are frequently considered contrary principles, in that power enforces, while ethics elicits a free response. But, as James P. Mackey shows, a more adventurous philosophical study of human morality, with its focus locked firmly on to the enabling and directional power of Eros, illuminates simultaneously our sense of obligation, our freedom, and our engagement with other persons and things in the common quest for well-being (the good); the sense of contraries is evaded thereby and we are set on the quest for the kind of power that liberates human creativity. It is then possible to undertake a critical assessment of the kind of power that ought to be operative in the major structures of human society, whether civil or ecclesiastical, state governments and church hierarchies. The religious question quite naturally emerges as to whether this Eros-type power so manifest in human society originates from beyond the more empirical structures of churches, states, and 'nature'; and the effort to detect the specifically Christian characterisation of an allegedly ultimate power working in us for final well-being finds its natural context, and is given attention by the author, in what follows.