|
| 
| Author: Carl Anderson
Publisher: HarperOne
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $10.99
You Save: $8.96 (45%)
New (33) Used (9) from $9.70
Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 441
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 0061335312
Dewey Decimal Number: 261
EAN: 9780061335310
ASIN: 0061335312
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: The book is new like all my items new.......
|
| Customer Reviews:
 A must read for all serious Catholics. April 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Carl Anderson provides a well thought-out approach to making our world a better place for everyone.
"A call to active hope" April 16, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection" Eight decades after Freud's criticism of the Christian call to love comes a reflection and reply worth noting.
Ambitiously, the book develops Catholic theological ideas to their practical conclusions and sets them in the common secular marketplace of ideas. Love, as the fundamental law of God, is our natural law; the structure of love based on theology of the Trinity creates the guide for marriage and family; the dignity of the human person based on being created in the image of God demands charity and respect. In these, his reasoning is undeniably Catholic, and especially papal, yet his diversity of examples helps enormously to broaden and concretize the concepts.
Crucial to the feasibility of a civilization of love in a culture of capitalism is the treatment of work, and his chapters on marketplace ethics and globalization provide a positive philosophy on labor unattempted by a bestseller since Ayn Rand. However, his message is radically different: the dignity of work lies in its participation in mankind's redemption. Business and globalization become noble in their unique capacity to translate love into the systems of enterprise; when they go awry, they reveal in a calculable way the cost we put on human life.
The risk in writing a book about love is that it requires some amount of repetition of a very, well, common theme in life. Fortunately, Anderson proves himself a master at drawing out the intricacies (radical and compelling in their own right) in each new light, and successfully avoids the singsong of flowerchild mantras that so detrimentally cauterized the serious consideration a civilization of love till now.
And in this, practicality can never be far. This is especially true in the suggestions for contemplation and action at the end of each chapter. Rather than being guidebooky, they seek more to train the eye to reconnect and reassess one's life - challenging and revitalizing and, I might add, fascinating to bring up with family or friends. I was surprised at how different their responses they gave on some issues.
I also found the book's website an interesting reference and well worth the exploration: www.acivilizationoflove.com
As a whole, the book does more than it proposed, and becomes a breakthrough and fundamental document in what we can expect to become a vital debate. For skeptics, Anderson creates a sort of apologia pro amore, presenting vividly an argument for the rationality of the Christian vocation to love. For the converted, he brings out an analysis of love that brings an integrity that revolutionizes not only how we look at love in our life but how we live the privilege of the vocation to love.
A revitalizing read -
 From the wife of a Knight of Columbus March 31, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
After reading A Civilization of Love, I had one overwhelming thought: this is a good man.
We are in need of such good men. As the cultural voices in America become increasingly polarized and dispirited, Carl Anderson offers a good man's thoughtful exploration of the major issues facing our humanity: freedom, love, sex, work, ethics and justice. Central to Anderson's suggestions about how to "transform the world" is an understanding that one good man cannot face these aspects of human life with any sustaining goodness of his own. He quotes a 1964 sermon by then-Father Joseph Ratzinger: "[God] loves us not because we are good, but because he is good."
The Civilization of Love is the witness of a man in the world-- CEO, attorney, former White House staffer--who has taken a stand and made a commitment to receive the transforming goodness offered to men and women in the life of the Catholic Church, through the living presence of Jesus Christ.
As the wife of a Knight of Columbus, I am happy that Mr. Anderson is leading other good men by continuing to point the way toward a civilization of love.
A tour de force Catholic Manifesto March 31, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is a superbly written, historically enriching, and culturally engaging!
Its a sort of contemporary manifesto for Catholics. But there's something here for Protestants and Eastern Orthodox alike.
For a comparatively similar perspective of what Anderson attempts for Catholics, see JP Moreland's KINGDOM TRIANGLE, which is a manifesto to Protestant evangelicals.
Defining the "good life" - in a different way March 29, 2008
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
The dust jacket of Carl Anderson's "A Civilization of Love" strikes a seemingly familiar note: "The battle today is between the culture of death (where people are judged by their social or economic value) and the culture of life." The expectation might be yet another polemical broadside to weigh down shelves already overloaded with such wares: The world is going to hell in a hand basket; hang on for the ride.
Yet Anderson seems to be up to something more, and that something more is evident almost immediately in the first pages of "A Civilization of Love." The polarity is only a starting point, rather than an apocalyptic call to arms - or a trumpet to sound retreat to the hills. Anderson is the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, so it is unsurprising to see him choose his title from a phrase by Pope John Paul II. Is it a throwaway? Is it an empty phrase? Is it an opposition - such as many have tried to draw - against the smaller "mustard seed" idea of the Church and Christianity of John Paul's successor, Benedict XVI?
The answer only becomes fully clear when Anderson reveals his working paradigm in his conclusion. Anderson latches on to three possible approaches of the Christian to society identified by twentieth century Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr: 1) "Christ against culture," with Christ's message understood as a call to revolt against, or at least separate from, society; 2) "Christ of culture," an Enlightenment idea of Christianity as fully compatible with society, and Christ reduced merely to a great moral teacher; or 3) "Christ above culture" - the Christian message as engaged with, yet distinct from, the world. It is this last approach that Anderson embraces, and provides his thesis. "The message and event of Jesus Christ," Anderson insists, "cannot be limited simply to an affirmation - or for that matter, a repudiation - of existing cultural norms." Human beings are called to love. And because they are called to love, it is only by (re)building a culture, a civilization, which loves that we can overcome the conflicts and threats we face today. And in this great task, the Catholic, the Christian, is indispensable: This is the great work we are called to.
All of may sound rather rarified. "Civilization of Love," however, is a very accessible work to the educated layman, and eminently practical, and remarkably succinct (only 173 pages). Every chapter ends with a short list of "Suggestions for Contemplation and Action." The survey for this engagement ranges from the very smallest unit of society, the family ("The Domestic Church") to the largest, the increasingly intertwined (and yet conflicted) global society ("Globalization and the Gospel of Work"). Anderson clearly hopes to do more than move books; he wants to move the world. And like Archimedes, he has found a lever, the only lever, capable of doing so: the salvific grace of Christ, the very embodiment of love.
In short, "A Civilization of Love" is a valuable contribution to the public discourse between the Christian and the secular - one at once both intellectual and eminently practical.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
