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Love's Grateful Striving
註釋"In this volume, M. Jamie Ferreira seeks to rehabilitate Works of Love as one of Kierkegaard's most important works, arguing that it makes two distinctive and vital contributions to contemporary discussions about the character of our responsibility for others. First, through its proposals concerning God as "middle term," the aesthetic dimension of a religious ethic, and the centrality of human needs, it suggests how a religious ethic needs to, and can, do justice to its theological commitments without thereby jeopardizing the ethical values of attention to the concrete distinctiveness of individual persons and social responsibility. Second, it contributes to specifically ethical debates about the tension in ethical responsibility between partiality and impartiality, difference and sameness, self-esteem and self-sacrifice, and concrete distinctiveness and equality. Through its sensitivity to ways in which the ethical relation is one of vision as well as of blindness, of respect for alterity as well as for kinship, it offers a nuanced correction of what seem to be crude dichotomies in contemporary discussions about responsibility to our neighbor. Works of Love provides resources for understanding how we can respect both the equality and the concrete distinctiveness of others; moreover, the deliberations on building up others, forgiveness, and reconciliation address communal dimensions of the responsibility implied in the love-commandment. Ferreira argues that Works of Love can deepen our appreciation of the ways in which love can be understood as gift, debt, and need - simultaneously. This reading of Kierkegaard's understanding of commanded love, duty, and infinite debt brings his ethic into productive conversation with those in our day who argue for the precedence of ethics over ontology, and it clarifies his relation to his Lutheran heritage."--Jacket of print edition.