Amor Mundi

Love in many premodern cultures extended to and permeated the world or even the cosmos, but love in contemporary consumerist society tends to be sexualized, romanticized, and individualized. As a result, ancient visions of ethical love are difficult for moderns to comprehend, especially those rooted in premodern Western thought, or Native American thinkers that describe a love of the natural world that would help us live more responsibly on the Earth. This volume retrieves the significant narratives of love of the world and the concomitant ethical ramifications of those visions and argues that our age of science and technology has destroyed the ancient, living cosmos of previous visions and replaced it with a mechanical universe. This shift has resulted in various forms of destruction, diminishment, and forgetfulness. Overcoming modern world alienation requires recovering a sense of what it means to love the world and changing our practices to reflect our interconnection with it and our interdependency on it.

The title of our collection is owed to Hannah Arendt herself. Writing to Karl Jaspers on August 6, 1955, she spoke of how she had only just begun to really love the world and expressed her desire to testify to that love in the title of what came to be published as The Human Condition: "Out of gratitude, I want to call my book about political theories Arnor Mundi. "t In retrospect, it was fitting that amor mundi, love of the world, never became the title of only one of Arendt's studies, for it is the theme which permeates all of her thought. The purpose of this volume's a- ticles is to pay a critical tribute to this theme by exploring its meaning, the cultural and intellectual sources from which it derives, as well as its resources for conte- porary thought and action. We are privileged to include as part of the collection two previously unpu- lished lectures by Arendt as well as a rarely noticed essay which she wrote in 1964. Taken together, they engrave the central features of her vision of amor mundi. Arendt presented "Labor, Work, Action" on November 10, 1964, at a conference "Christianity and Economic Man:Moral Decisions in an Affluent Society," which 2 was held at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.

Amor Mundi: The Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman' delves deep into this remarkable singular collection. Over two volumes, Amor Mundi presents an edited selection of over 400 works of modern and contemporary art from the Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman, from the pieces brought together by Marguerite Steed and her late husband Robert Hoffman (1947-2006) to more recent outstanding acquisitions. Over 30 authors - artists and art historians - explore this fascinating collection, addressing specific artworks as well as the motivations behind the collection's creation and ongoing evolution. Created over the course of a two-year period, great care has been taken to reflect the collection's key artists, canonical works, and the issues and debates that have helped shape its direction for more than a quarter of a century. By highlighting the art and artists as well as the ideological principles underlying the collection, it is hoped that Amor Mundi will shed some light on how to interpret this extraordinary collection of modern and contemporary art as well as communicating something about the personality of the woman who assembled it.00Texts by Martin Jay, Renee Green, Susan L. Aberth, Sarah Celeste Bancroft, Renate Bertlmann, Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Susan Davidson, Gavin Delahunty, TR Ericsson, Tamar Garb, Robert Gober, Rachel Haidu, Merlin James, Wyatt Kahn, Ragnar Kjartansson, Anna Lovatt, Leora Maltz-Leca, Nic Nicosia, Charles Ray, Mark Rosenthal, Dana Schutz, Barry Schwabsky, Richard Shiff, Raphaela Simon, Michelle Stuart, Kirsten Swenson, Mary Weatherford, Terry Winters. Interviews by Martin Jay and Marguerite Steed Hoffman, Gavin Delahunty and Isabelle Graw.

What is the spirit that animates collective action? What is the ethos of democracy? Worldly Ethics offers a powerful and original response to these questions, arguing that associative democratic politics, in which citizens join together and struggle to shape shared conditions, requires a world-centered ethos. This distinctive ethos, Ella Myers shows, involves care for "worldly things," which are the common and contentious objects of concern around which democratic actors mobilize. In articulating the meaning of worldly ethics, she reveals the limits of previous modes of ethics, including Michel Foucault's therapeutic model, based on a "care of the self," and Emmanuel Levinas's charitable model, based on care for the Other. Myers contends that these approaches occlude the worldly character of political life and are therefore unlikely to inspire and support collective democratic activity. The alternative ethics she proposes is informed by Hannah Arendt's notion of amor mundi, or love of the world, and it focuses on the ways democratic actors align around issues, goals, or things in the world, practicing collaborative care for them. Myers sees worldly ethics as a resource that can inspire and motivate ordinary citizens to participate in democratic politics, and the book highlights civic organizations that already embody its principles.

A study in nature-based colors, Christina Rossetti's timeless poem is here represented in vivid, interpretive art by French illustrator Laëtitia Devernay.

In this volume, which concludes John W. Rettig's translation of St. Augustine's Tractates on the Gospel of John, Augustine applies his keen insight and powers of rhetoric to the sacred text, drawing the audience into an intimate contemplation of Jesus through the course of his Passion, Death, and Resurrection.

Today, we find ourselves surrounded by numerous reasons to despair, from loneliness, suffering and death at an individual level to societal alienation, oppression, sectarian conflict and war. No honest assessment of life can take place without facing up to these facts and it is not surprising that more and more people are beginning to suspect that the human story will end in tragedy. However, this focus on despair does not paint a complete and accurate picture of reality, which is also inflected with beauty and goodness. Working with examples from poetry and literature, including Virginia Woolf and Jack Gilbert and the films of Terrence Malick, Melancholic Joy offers an honest assessment of the human condition. It unflinchingly acknowledges the everyday frustrations and extraordinary horrors that generate despair and argues that the appropriate response is to take up joy again, not in an attempt to ignore or dismiss evil, but rather as part of a “melancholic joy” that accepts the mystery of a world both beautiful and brutal.