Amor Mundi and Overcoming Modern World Alienation

Amor mundi, love of the world, is vital to democracy and public happiness, and also to the Earth and the environment. But it has been largely lost in modern society. What is it? How was it lost? Can it be recovered? This volume argues that it can—and should be—recovered, and such as ramifications for Christian political ethics.

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.