A quote from "C. Fred Alford's "After the Holocaust: The Book of Job, Primo Levi, and the Path to Affliction":
**caritas** is distinct from Eros, which – as everyone from Plato to Freud
knew – retains at its core a selfish element (Plato, Symposium, 203b–e;
Freud 1930, 113–17). While the Greek Eros may be rendered by the
Latin **amor**, **caritas** has a richer set of connotations than the Greek
philia. The Greek **agape** comes close, but it is unnecessary to use a term
so closely associated with Christian love.
An attitude of **caritas** toward the particulars of this world, what I
have called attention, is one that renders this world sacred and holy –
not in the sense that it belongs to God but rather in the sense that
humans become capable of taking their everyday experiences with the
things and people of this world and lifting them out of the mundane
by an act of attention, or lucid concentration. In doing so, everyday
experiences become for a moment numinous, set apart and special,
worthy of our wonder and our awe. Paying attention renders the world
we live in sacred, holy, and ablaze with meaning.
I've been slacking off on my extra-curricular reading the last few months. Got to
work on changing that.
Last night, I finally completed C. Fred Alford's "After the Holocaust: The Book of Job, Primo Levi, and the Path to Affliction"
It's a multi-disciplinary […]
[Original post on hachyderm.io]