The primal destruction of man was self-love. There is no one who does not love himself; but one must search for the right love and avoid the warped. Indeed you did not love yourself when you did not love the God who made you. These three sentences set side by side show why the problem of self-love in St. Augustine of Hippo constitutes a problem. Self-love is loving God; it is also hating God. Self-love is common to all men; it (...) is restricted to those who love God. Mutually incompatible assertions about self-love jostle one another and demand to be reconciled. --from the Introduction In saying that self-love finds its only true expression in love of God Augustine is formulating in one of many possible ways a principle fundamental to his metaphysical and ethical outlook, namely that moral obligation derives from an obligation to God which is at the same time a call to self-fulfillment. --from the Conclusion. (shrink)

The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of racial-ethnic women's (...) "motherwork.". (shrink)

Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking represents a great contribution to moral philosophy-in particular, by bringing women's "private" virtues into the public sphere. However, there remain problems in the analysis which need to be addressed: How can one possibly generalize about the practice of mothering from one, necessarily limited, perspective, given the facts of cultural diversity? Is Ruddick's normative account of mothering congruent with the reflective judgments of others? Is her account of the transformation of parochial mothering into feminist peace work viable? (...) After exploring these three questions, this reviewer calls, with Ruddick, for the telling of more maternal stories, from different cultural, racial and economic perspectives. (shrink)