In the Good Samaritan parable, the victim suffering from an assault and the passing Samaritan who cares for him are inspired by two different facets of Joseph’s life. Joseph was a victim, beaten up by his brothers and thrown into a pit. Later, as the ancestor of the Samaritans, he was the rescuer of the Egyptians and his family from famine.

The Joseph story has money the brothers paid for grain surreptitiously returned to their sacks, in some sense a loan only but, as it turned out, an act concealing a gift, which led to reconciliation. Topics in the Two Debtors parable covering debt, sin, and forgiveness rework these features of the Joseph story.

This ethnography explores violence in relationships in Sierra Leone, using the ‘teeth and tongue’ metaphor to reveal the complex interplay between love and violence, particularly in gender dynamics. It examines how global agendas lead some states to extend regulatory control into intimacy, often perpetuating neo-colonial mechanisms. The study probes the clash between rigid state laws and the nuanced intricacies of lived experiences, analysing the impact of ostensibly impartial rights discourses. The book analyses the effects of external violence on relationships (Chapter 2), contemporary relationship dynamics in Freetown (Chapter 3), and critiques prevalent conceptualisations of love and violence phenomenologically (Chapters 4 and 5). It then examines the mediation and regulation of violence by households and communities (Chapter 6), state courts for adults (Chapter 7), and the legal treatment of minors (Chapter 8). The book traces the impact of new legislation on young men who were imprisoned and their partners (Chapter 9).

Does the conception of worship – in expressing, as it does, a direct relationship with God – prevent an understanding of love for God as mediated by love for humans? Taking the latter to be an existential model of one’s relationship with God, in this chapter I answer in the negative to the above question by demonstrating the role that worship plays in such a model. To do so, I turn to Kierkegaard’s image of “resting transparently” in God. For Kierkegaard, this image represents what he perceives as the highest possible state of the believer’s relationship with God; a state that is achieved, according to Kierkegaard, when one becomes the self – the individual – that God intends one to be. And how does one become this self? By loving properly the neighbour (that is, another individual). The suggestion I develop in this chapter is that it is the worshipping of God – that is, by being in a state of respect and attendance to God’s will – that directs one in loving properly the neighbour. Hence, it is worship of God that paves the way to fully loving the neighbour and thus to fully loving God.

In Hopkins’s writing, eroticism centres on eros or amor and loving the body of Christ. In the framework of Hopkins’s spiritual eroticism, eros or amor is love. Understanding the significance of love and the body in Hopkins’s writings – his poems, sermons, spiritual writings, diaries, essays, and letters – allows us to come to a fuller understanding of his relationship with Christ. Hopkins’s vow of celibacy afforded him the freedom to express his passion for Christ through romantic and sexual tropes such as touching hands, melting and merging subjects, beating hearts, magnetic attraction, mutual gazes, kisses, embraces, fecundity, and homecoming. We shall look at some of these tropes in this chapter, many of which can be traced back to ancient Greece and the early church fathers. Ultimately, Hopkins wrote about erotic desires and tactile pleasures in a manner that was broad and expansive.

In Chapter 9, I discuss the next two chapters of the Itinerarium (Chapters 3 and 4), those that correspond to the second pair of the Seraph’s wings, those around the angel’s body. These represent the vision of God we get from looking at the image we find of God “inside” us in our intellectual powers — those made possible by reason alone (such as memory, understanding, and will) and those infused by grace (such as faith, hope, and love). I show why these two chapters are the most complex and difficult in the entire book.

This chapter treats love, desire and eroticism, arguing that eros and philotes serve as metapoetic structuring principles of epic narrative. It begins with a preliminary survey of the foundational texts, focusing on the scene of Helen at the loom as she weaves a tapestry of warriors in battle, essentially a figuration of the Iliad as an artistic product of sexual longing. The chapter then moves forward to consider how these same erotic structuring principles play out in imperial Greek epic, which absorbs Homer’s models through the filter of romantic fiction. Smith focuses on the first three books of Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica – the events surrounding Penthesileia, Memnon, and the death of Achilles – reading them as flirtatious manipulations that intensify readerly anticipation, and then turns to Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, specifically the tendril imagery in the Ampelos episode and its sequel, the romance of Calamus and Carpus. These episodes serve as exemplars of the regenerative powers of epic desire.

Moving to Edinburgh from Glasgow to study medicine at the age of 17. A brief description of teaching methods as they were then. My experience of psychiatry as a medical student, and a discussion of self-harm. Met my future husband, who was to spend a lot of his life as an agricultural economist, working in Mexico.

The Conclusion draws together the themes of the book, and expands on how the foregoing discussions of art relate to ordinary life and love. Expanding the categories of ‘finding’ and ‘making’ by that of ‘receiving’, it sketches a constructive vision of the theological imagination.

This chapter examines the action of breach of promise of marriage to show its relationships with deception. It outlines how a broken promise of marriage, which could always imply deception regarding intention to keep the promise, attracted damages and highlights how known deception constituted an aggravation. The chapter also demonstrates how deception about certain features of oneself or one’s circumstances could justify a fiancé(e)’s decision to break a promise of marriage. Beyond these points, the chapter shows how conventions about relationships shaped the processes by which promises of marriage could be inferred or imputed, and it explores the links between actions of breach of promise of marriage and changing expectations of marriage, including the expectation that it should be based on real love. Through this process, the chapter offers an original argument about the decline of breach of promise at marriage which reveals its changing relationship to deception. The chapter concludes with some reflections on what actions of breach of promise suggest about the capacity of law to regulate promises and statements of future intention, as they relate to intimacy, in a contemporary context.

Migration destabilized family life, gender, and sexuality. Whereas most Turkish guest workers traveled alone during the formal recruitment period (1961–1973), West Germany’s subsequent policy of family reunification sparked the increased migration of spouses and children. This chapter shows that, although migrants developed strategies to maintain connections to home, separation anxieties and fears of abandonment loomed. The departure of able-bodied young workers strained local economies, upended gender roles, and separated loved ones, sparking tensions at home: were guest workers sending enough money home, communicating enough, and remaining faithful to spouses? In Germany, reports about sex between male guest workers and German women fueled Orientalist tropes about “foreigners,” perpetuated stereotypes about Turkish men’s propensity toward violence, and stoked fears about the transgression of national and racial borders. Women left behind worried that their husbands would commit adultery while abroad. Guest workers’ children were viewed simultaneously as victims and threats: some stayed behind in Turkey, others were brought to Germany, and thousands of “suitcase children” (Kofferkinder) repeatedly moved back and forth between the two countries with their bags perpetually packed. As physical estrangement evolved into emotional estrangement, the perceived abandonment of the family came to represent the abandonment of the nation.

At the close of Proust’s A La recherche, Marcel reflects on his late discovery that there is within him a ‘vast dimension’ of lost time, composed of moments that ‘still adhered to me and that I could still find again, merely by descending to a greater depth within myself’. The vehicle through which he is to achieve that descent, he thinks to himself, is the novel itself, the novel he is now to write.

A la recherche is, for this reason, a novel which demands to be reread, a novel which reveals the structural necessity of rereading that inhabits all acts of being in time. This essay responds to this demand, and this necessity, by reading Proust’s novel as an exercise in rereading. The epiphanic close to the novel rests on the conviction that there will come a form of writing, and a form of reading, that might absorb lost time into itself, and in so doing stage a recovery of a spent past, and of a spent life. But in calling in this way for its own repetition, the novel can only live, again, through the loss that it seeks to overcome. This inescapable play between recovery and loss, though, does not constitute a failure of the hope that the novel seems, on each reading, to rediscover. Rather, in inserting a logic of rereading into its own expressive mechanism, the novel becomes a scale for weighing those elements of time that are recoverable against those that are not. It allows us to see the novel as a differential machine, that can find the junction, in the contemporary moment of reading, between that which can be saved and that which cannot – the junction that is the horizon, in our own time, of literary, political and personal possibility.

The Epilogue offers some concluding remarks while explaining why later Jacobean and Caroline plays are excluded from this study. In the process, it offers a brief consideration of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge.

Chapter 5 concludes the book with an analysis of the Maieutic section of the dialogue. It heralds a new beginning in the conversation, in which Socrates, having received at last Alcibiades’ full allegiance in question and answer, finally reveals to him his own being so as to secure commitment to a love that strives to grasp the totality of all that is, the highest expression of which is none other than the contemplative life. Self-knowing emerges as the zealous pursuit of the ultimate desideratum in the philosophical life, a striving that is akin to self-cultivation. Reason heals the soul, collecting it out of its opinionative and passionate dispersion, only to recognize, in the end, its synthetic activity is done in light of a higher grade of reality that transcends it, a reality in which it finally longs to participate; it yearns to become intellect.