In Love and Freedom, Jorge Ferrer proposes a paradigm shift in how romantic relationships are conceptualized, a step forward in the evolution of modern relationships. In the same way that the transgender movement surmounted the gender binary, Ferrer defines how a parallel step can—and should—be taken with the relational style binary. This book offers the first systematic discussion of relationship modes beyond monogamy and polyamory, as well as introduces the notion of “relational freedom” as the capability to choose one’s relational style free from biological, psychological, and sociocultural conditionings. To achieve these goals, Ferrer first discusses a number of critical categories—specifically, monopride/polyphobia, and polypride/monophobia—that mediate the contemporary “mono–poly wars,” that is, the predicament of mutual competition among monogamists and polyamorists. The ideological nature of these “mono–poly wars” is demonstrated through a review of available empirical literature on the psychological health and relationship quality of monogamous and polyamorous individuals and couples. Then, after showing how monogamy and polyamory ultimately reinforce each other, Ferrer articulates three relational pathways to living in-between, through, and beyond the mono/poly binary: fluidity, hybridity, and transcendence. Moving beyond that binary opens a fuzzy, liminal, and multivocal relational space that Ferrer calls novogamy. In this groundbreaking book, readers will learn practical tools to not only transform jealousy, but also enhance their relational freedom while being aware of key issues of diversity and social justice. They will also learn novel criteria to evaluate the success of their intimate relationships, and be introduced to a transformed vision of romantic love beyond both monocentrism and emerging polynormativities.

Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, Love As Human Freedom sees love as a practice that changes over time through which new social realities are brought into being. Love brings about, and helps us to explain, immense social-historical shifts—from the rise of feminism and the emergence of bourgeois family life, to the struggles for abortion rights and birth control and the erosion of a gender-based division of labor. Drawing on Hegel, Paul A. Kottman argues that love generates and explains expanded possibilities for freely lived lives. Through keen interpretations of the best known philosophical and literary depictions of its topic—including Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche, Ovid, Flaubert, and Tolstoy—his book treats love as a fundamental way that we humans make sense of temporal change, especially the inevitability of death and the propagation of life.

Two powerful men-one at the mercy of bipolar disorder, the other facing life imprisonment-struggle to regain their freedom. The life of Luke Powers has long been punctuated by abrupt changes in fortune, but nothing could prepare him for the possibility of life imprisonment. Facing charges of murdering the love of his life from thirty years earlier, the influential media mogul is powerless to escape his predicament. Is he a murderer? Even he cannot say for sure. Meanwhile, entrepreneur and family man Rick Dellich finds himself stripped of all his rights as a citizen, the result of a mental breakdown. Separated from those he loves, he faces the prospect of confinement to a chemical straightjacket for the rest of the life. Desperate for a true recovery, he commits himself to a psychiatric clinic. Rick struggles to put his shattered life back together, but his deepening search for answers leads him to revelations that threaten to turn his world upside down. Through it all, two women, each offering the possibility of the love that seems to have betrayed him all his life, weave their way into Luke's destiny. Will each man succeed in his quest for love and freedom? Will each man find what he is seeking? Both will face challenges that will destroy or transform them, eventually placing the two on a collision course with one another. Set against a backdrop of four continents, this is a story of power, love, and ultimate freedom.

By critically engaging Eberhard Jüngel's doctrine of the Trinity, this volume makes a broader, constructive contribution to contemporary trinitarian thought.The argument centers on the question - posed by the inconsistencies uncovered in Jüngel's doctrine of God - of how one can assert both divine freedom and the inter-subjectivity of God's trinitarian self-determination. Can one maintain God's freedom in the interest of divine spontaneity and creativity, while remaining committed to inter-subjective vulnerability which the Cross entails as an event of divine love? Malysz suggests that a resolution to this problem lies in a logic of divine freedom, which, next to the trinitarian logic of love, constitutes a different and simultaneous mode of trinitarian relationality. To develop this logic, Malysz draws on Jüngel's understanding of human freedom as rooted in the "elemental interruption" of the self-securing subject. Malysz thus not only brings Jüngel's view of divine freedom into correspondence with the anthropological effects that Jüngel ascribes to it, but, above all, offers an imaginative, new way of closely integrating the doctrine of God and theological anthropology.