Declared “a writer to watch” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), New York Times bestselling author María Dueñas pours heart and soul into this story of a woman who discovers the power of second chances. A talented college professor in Madrid, Blanca Perea seems to have it all. But her world is suddenly shattered when her husband of twenty years leaves her for another woman. Questioning the life she once had and whether she truly knows herself, Blanca resolves to change her surroundings. She accepts what looks like a boring research grant in California involving an exiled Spanish writer who died decades ago. Anxious to leave her own troubled life behind, she is gradually drawn into his haunted world, with its poignant loves and unfulfilled ambitions. But in delving into the past, Blanca finds herself simultaneously awakened to the present by Daniel Carter, a charismatic professor with crucial knowledge about the dead writer that he has never before revealed. Amid this web of passion, conflict, and hidden feelings, including her own, Blanca advances like an avid detective, refusing to quit, and ultimately discovers startling answers that resonate deeply in her own life. Evocative, lyrical, and humorous, The Heart Has Its Reasons is a journey of the soul from the pangs of the past to the vibrant present. It is a story about the thrill of creating one’s life anew.

The Heart Has Its Reasons explores a hitherto neglected area of theological anthropology: the unity of human emotion and reason embodied in the Biblical concept of the heart. While the theological contours of human rationality have long been clearlydrawn and presented as the exclusive seat of the image of God, affectivity has been relegated to a secondary position. With the reintegration of the body into recent philosophical and theological discourses, a number of questions have arisen: if theimage (also) resides in the body, how does this change one's view of the theological significance of human affect? In what way is our likeness to God realised in the whole of what we are? Can one overcome the traditional dissociation between intellect and affect by a renewed theory of love? In conversation with patristic and medieval authors like Irenaeus, Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus, and Thomas Aquinas, and in dialogue with more recent interlocutors such as Blaise Pascal, Ricoeur, Marion, Milbank, and John Paul II, Beata Toth pursues a novel theological vision of the essential unity of our humanity.

From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On Bullshit, a profound meditation on how and why we love In The Reasons of Love, leading moral philosopher and bestselling author Harry Frankfurt argues that the key to a fulfilled life is to pursue wholeheartedly what one cares about, that love is the most authoritative form of caring, and that the purest form of love is, in a complicated way, self-love. Through caring, we infuse the world with meaning. Caring provides us with stable ambitions and concerns, and it shapes the framework of aims and interests within which we lead our lives. Love is a nonvoluntary, disinterested concern for the flourishing of what we love—and self-love, as distinct from self-indulgence, is at heart of this concern. The most elementary form of self-love is no more than the desire to love, and self-love is simply a commitment to finding meaning in our lives.