Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, Love As Human Freedom sees love as a practice that changes over time through which new social realities are brought into being. Love brings about, and helps us to explain, immense social-historical shifts—from the rise of feminism and the emergence of bourgeois family life, to the struggles for abortion rights and birth control and the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. Drawing on Hegel, Paul A. Kottman argues that love generates and explains expanded possibilities for freely lived lives. Through keen interpretations of the best known philosophical and literary depictions of its topic—including Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche, Ovid, Flaubert, and Tolstoy—his book treats love as a fundamental way that we humans make sense of temporal change, especially the inevitability of death and the propagation of life.

They baked New England's Thanksgiving pies, preached their faith to crowds of worshippers, spied for the patriots during the Revolution, wrote that human bondage was a sin, and demanded reparations for slavery. Black women in colonial and revolutionary New England sought not only legal emancipation from slavery but defined freedom more broadly to include spiritual, familial, and economic dimensions. Hidden behind the banner of achieving freedom was the assumption that freedom meant affirming black manhood The struggle for freedom in New England was different for men than for women. Black men in colonial and revolutionary New England were struggling for freedom from slavery and for the right to patriarchal control of their own families. Women had more complicated desires, seeking protection and support in a male headed household while also wanting personal liberty. Eventually women who were former slaves began to fight for dignity and respect for womanhood and access to schooling for black children.

In Love and Freedom, Jorge Ferrer proposes a paradigm shift in how romantic relationships are conceptualized, a step forward in the evolution of modern relationships. In the same way that the transgender movement surmounted the gender binary, Ferrer defines how a parallel step can—and should—be taken with the relational style binary. This book offers the first systematic discussion of relationship modes beyond monogamy and polyamory, as well as introduces the notion of “relational freedom” as the capability to choose one’s relational style free from biological, psychological, and sociocultural conditionings. To achieve these goals, Ferrer first discusses a number of critical categories—specifically, monopride/polyphobia, and polypride/monophobia—that mediate the contemporary “mono–poly wars,” that is, the predicament of mutual competition among monogamists and polyamorists. The ideological nature of these “mono–poly wars” is demonstrated through a review of available empirical literature on the psychological health and relationship quality of monogamous and polyamorous individuals and couples. Then, after showing how monogamy and polyamory ultimately reinforce each other, Ferrer articulates three relational pathways to living in-between, through, and beyond the mono/poly binary: fluidity, hybridity, and transcendence. Moving beyond that binary opens a fuzzy, liminal, and multivocal relational space that Ferrer calls novogamy. In this groundbreaking book, readers will learn practical tools to not only transform jealousy, but also enhance their relational freedom while being aware of key issues of diversity and social justice. They will also learn novel criteria to evaluate the success of their intimate relationships, and be introduced to a transformed vision of romantic love beyond both monocentrism and emerging polynormativities.

Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt offer a fresh translation of Schelling's enigmatic and influential masterpiece, widely recognized as an indispensable work of German Idealism. The text is an embarrassment of riches—both wildly adventurous and somberly prescient. Martin Heidegger claimed that it was "one of the deepest works of German and thus also of Western philosophy" and that it utterly undermined Hegel's monumental Science of Logic before the latter had even appeared in print. Schelling carefully investigates the problem of evil by building on Kant's notion of radical evil, while also developing an astonishingly original conception of freedom and personality that exerted an enormous (if subterranean) influence on the later course of European philosophy from Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard through Heidegger to important contemporary theorists like Slavoj Zðizûek. This translation of Schelling's notoriously difficult and densely allusive work provides extensive annotations and translations of a series of texts (by Boehme, Baader, Lessing, Jacobi, and Herder), hard to find or previously unavailable in English, whose presence in the Philosophical Investigations is unmistakable and highly significant. This handy study edition of Schelling's masterpiece will prove useful for scholars and students alike.

The defining premise of the Relational Free Will Defense is the claim that authentic love requires free will. Many scholars, including Gregory Boyd and Vincent Brümmer, champion this claim. Best-selling books, such as Rob Bell’s Love Wins, echo that love “cannot be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide.” The claim that love requires free will has even found expression in mainstream Hollywood films, including Frailty, Bruce Almighty, and The Adjustment Bureau. The analysis shows convincingly that the claim that authentic love requires free will, does not meet the criteria of consistency, compatibility with Scriptural sources, and the demands of concrete encounter with problems of moral evil.

We ask God to involve himself providentially in our lives, yet we cherish our freedom to choose and act. Employing both theological reflection and philosophical analysis, the author explores how to resolve the interesting and provocative puzzles arising from these seemingly conflicting desires. He inquires what sovereignty means and how sovereigns balance their power and prerogatives with the free responses of their subjects. Since we are physically embodied in a physical world, we also need to ask how this is compatible with our being free agents. Providence raises questions about God's fundamental attributes. The author considers what it means to affirm God's goodness as logically contingent, how being almighty interfaces with God's self-limitation, and the persistent problems that arise from claiming that God foreknows the future. Discussion of these divine properties spills over into the related issues of why God allows, or even causes, pain and suffering; why, if God is all-knowing, we need to petition God repeatedly and encounter so many unanswered prayers; and how miracles, as ways God acts in the world, are possible and knowable. Throughout, the author looks at Scripture and attends to how providence deepens our understanding of God and enriches our lives.

A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER In the face of systemic racism and state-sanctioned violence, how can we metabolize our anger into a force for liberation? White supremacy in the United States has long necessitated that Black rage be suppressed, repressed, or denied, often as a means of survival, a literal matter of life and death. In Love and Rage, Lama Rod Owens, coauthor of Radical Dharma, shows how this unmetabolized anger--and the grief, hurt, and transhistorical trauma beneath it--needs to be explored, respected, and fully embodied to heal from heartbreak and walk the path of liberation. This is not a book about bypassing anger to focus on happiness, or a road map for using spirituality to transform the nature of rage into something else. Instead, it is one that offers a potent vision of anger that acknowledges and honors its power as a vehicle for radical social change and enduring spiritual transformation. Love and Rage weaves the inimitable wisdom and lived experience of Lama Rod Owens with Buddhist philosophy, practical meditation exercises, mindfulness, tantra, pranayama, ancestor practices, energy work, and classical yoga. The result is a book that serves as both a balm and a blueprint for those seeking justice who can feel overwhelmed with anger--and yet who refuse to relent. It is a necessary text for these times.