Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community

Gilbert Meilaender
-- Valparaiso University
"How can members of a society truly share a common life? How can a political community represent its shared identity without falling into an idolatry that fails to honor Christ, in whom alone humanity's true identity can find its representative image? And how might theology teach us to think about such questions? In these three tightly argued essays Oliver O'Donovan explores Augustine's famous definition of a people, arguing that a secular society alone cannot supply the expectant patience or eschatological hope it needs to sustain a nonidolatrous shared life in the face of a seemingly irreducible pluralism. In a world torn by conflicts between those who can seem to share no identity, O'Donovan's work will repay our careful attention."

Nancey Murphy
-- Fuller Theological Seminary
"This brief but far-reaching set of essays would make a fine textbook, valuable for opening students' eyes to the impoverishment of a great deal of current moral and political discourse."

Allen Verhey
-- Hope College
"These finely crafted lectures would have delighted Henry Stob. He would have been glad for the attention to the narrative of creation, fall, and redemption. He would have delighted in the retrieval of Augustine's notions that we know only as we love and that a community is formed by its common objects of love. He would have liked the criticism of modernity as the tradition that 'concealed its own transmission of tradition by a tradition of scorn for tradition.' He would have been grateful for the account O'Donovan gives of the 'evangelical discipline' of the anti-iconoclasts and for the contrast he makes with the undisciplined image-making of modern publicity. And in all of that Henry Stob would remain a model, for we should all delight in O'Donovan's profound and engaging reflections on community and politics."