Acknowledgements Introduction Part I: Dead Ends: Why We Need a New Understanding of Love 1. The neglected question: what is love's specific aim? 2. Back to the future: secularizing divine agape 3. The six major conceptions of love in Western history: a summary 4. Why we need a new conception of love Part II: Love: Towards a New Understanding 5. Love and the promise of rootedness 6. What is ontological rootedness? 7. God as paradigm of a loved one - but not of a lover 8.

Love as recognition of lineage 9. Love as recognition of ethical home 10. Love as recognition of power 11. Love and the call to existence 12. Relationship 13. Fear: the price of love 14. Destructiveness 15. Why love isn't the same as benevolence 16.

What divine violence teaches us about love 17. Self-interest as the source of self-giving 18. Exile as love's inspiration 19. Why some epochs (and people) value love more than others 20. The languages of love 21. The primacy of loving over being loved 22. Attentiveness: love's supreme virtue 23. Love and death 24.

"Overshooting" the loved one: love's impersonal dimension 25. Can we love ourselves? Part III: Narratives of Love As Rootedness 26. The Bible: love as a discovery of home 27. The Odyssey: love as a recovery of home Part IV: How Is Love Related to Beauty, Sex, and Goodness? 28. Plato's error: why beauty is not the ground of love 29. How important is sex to love? 30. The real relation between love and beauty 31. Can we love the ugly? 32.

Can we love evil? Part V: The Child as the New Supreme Object of Love 33. Why parental love is coming to trump romantic love 34. The conservatism of romantic love 35. Why isn't friendship the new archetypal love? 36. Conclusion: the child as the first truly modern archetypal object of love Bibliography Index.