Renewing Christian intellectual life in the world's research universities
Disciplinary scholars provide initial reactions and questions to help shape the final Theology Brief.
Kyoto University
Just imagine…you are a twenty-year old asylum seeker, a migrant from a Middle Eastern Country, warm but unsafe. You are now a lonely stranger in Helsinki where the winter snow and the winds blowing in from the sea are hostile. You live in a youth hostel, do not know anybody and life is exceedingly h…
University of Oxford
Much of science research involves a complex web of relationships, both among scientists within a research group in a lab and with collaborators in labs in other institutions around the world. The discussion of the Sovereignty of Love reminded me of a conversation I had with a Chinese Professor when …
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
My discipline is engineering (aerospace engineering in particular). Engineering at its best is about creating products, systems, and architectures which are responsive to a society’s needs and that improve the human condition. Examples are the provision of clean water, the electrification of society…
University of Rosario
In his Preview on The Sovereignty of Love, Professor O’Donovan delineates an argument in favour of the long-standing claim that love is a way of knowing the world. This claim opposes a dominant view of knowledge, particularly strong since the scientific revolution, according to which the only valid …
University of Melbourne
Professor O’Donovan’s work speaks to me in the context of being the Master of an academic residential collegiate community at the University of Melbourne founded by the Methodist Church and still associated with the wider Christian community through its affiliation with the Uniting Church in Austral…
University of Otago
“Personal loves, given priority in Jesus’ love-commands, are open to reciprocity and mutual communion.” This line from the Love Preview resonates with longstanding feminist critiques of the classical conception of consent to sexual activity as something that can effectively (whether due to doctrinal…
American Bar Foundation
Professor O’Donovan’s Preview opens up a new line of approach to my research on struggles for basic legal freedoms in 21 st Century China. Re-reading my field notes through the lens of love reveals a finely textured mosaic of love’s manifestations. These are apparent in the lives of China’s leading …
University of Hong Kong
Professor Oliver O’Donovan’s Theology Brief Preview on ‘The Sovereignty of Love’ inspires me to reflect on the tension between love and law. Professor O’Donovan explores the notion of love conceived as will and the love-command as a fulfilment of the law. Indeed, ‘love must be sincere’ (Romans 12:9a…
University of Queensland
Oliver O’Donovan’s thought-provoking reflection on the sovereignty of love demonstrates just how many dimensions of love need to be considered. He does not particularly focus on romantic love, or love that finds its fulfilment in marriage; but of course so much of what he writes has application to i…
Harvard Medical School
I appreciate the chance to read Professor O’Donovan’s Preview. As a psychiatrist who authored a chapter on love in a book on the virtues in psychiatric practice (Peteet 2022), I see loving as central to living well, and helping patients to love more effectively as a potentially important focus of tr…
Harvard University School of Public Health
I thank Professor O’Donovan for his reflections on love and its relation to the will, knowledge, the virtues, and justice; and I appreciate his many succinct insights.
University of Virginia
As expected, I find Professor O’Donovan’s brief essay rich and profound, and I look forward to the longer, more developed essay. I find especially helpful his linking of love to knowledge and his suggestive treatment of the differentiation of loving practices, e.g., that love sometimes requires fide…
University of Oxford
In my field of international relations, Raymond Aron has famously called states “cold monsters” (following Nietzsche; Hobbesian Leviathans and Behemoths are lurking in the background). Monsters are proverbially loveless creatures, and I personally find the idea rather unappealing. Yet, my observatio…
American Bar Foundation
As I seek to grasp Professor O’Donovan’s profound thought on love, I realize how little I have previously considered the ways its varieties of expression might penetrate scholarship, scholarly lives, and institutions. I begin my own efforts to grapple with this enhanced vision by raising questions a…
At the core of economic analysis is the idea that there are gains from trade between economic agents, such as individuals, businesses, states. The simplest formulation has two agents with different endowments of goods, who by trading with each other can attain bundles of goods that meet their ‘needs…
University of Technology Sydney
The topic of love is a dividing line between theology and economics. One might say theology is deeply concerned with love - its manifestations, divine and human; its definitions; its teloi. However, economics does not even have it as an explicit category.
Garrett-Evangelical Seminary
Love is beleaguered in a world that is increasingly polarizing and violent. Can we even begin to talk about “love” that can mend the rifts caused by “irreconcilable” opinions about “love”? In times like these, I appreciate the refreshing and succinct insights of Prof. O’Donovan’s Preview on Love (he…
Yale Divinity School
I am grateful for Oliver O’Donovan’s Preview on “The Sovereignty of Love,” which so compactly distills a lifetime of study and reflection on the special place of love in the Christian life. Anticipating the full brief, I hope that Professor O’Donovan will address there the puzzle of commanded love, …
Yale University
In my years as a professor of philosophy, I often had students come to my office with questions about the course they were taking from me. They didn’t understand something I said in my last lecture, they expressed disappointment over the grade I had given them on their essay and asked for advice abo…
Fundación Universitaria Seminario Bíblico de Colombia
Professor O’Donovan’s provocative Preview raises questions in relation to my own work. As I work with adherents of other religions, or with atheists, it is my perception that genuine love is operative in their way of being and acting (in varying degrees, naturally). Consequently, I have reservations…
Fundación Universitaria Seminario Bíblico de Colombia
I feel uncertain about Professor O’Donovan’s provocative statement that “the relation of love to justice…does not follow the pattern of the other virtues,” according to which love is the “golden chain” that connects other virtues, which are themselves “governed by special norms.” If the image of the…
No preview responses in that discipline.
