Transcendent Love: Dostoevsky and the Search for a Global Ethic

In Transcendent Love: Dostoevsky and the Search for a Global Ethic, Leonard G. Friesen ranges widely across Dostoevsky's stories, novels, journalism, notebooks, and correspondence to demonstrate how Dostoevsky engaged with ethical issues in his times and how those same issues continue to be relevant to today's ethical debates. Friesen contends that the Russian ethical voice, in particular Dostoevsky's voice, deserves careful consideration in an increasingly global discussion of moral philosophy and the ethical life. Friesen challenges the view that contemporary liberalism provides a religiously neutral foundation for a global ethic. He argues instead that Dostoevsky has much to offer when it comes to the search for a global ethic, an ethic that for Dostoevsky was necessarily grounded in a Christian concept of an active, extravagant, and transcendent love. Friesen also investigates Dostoevsky's response to those who claimed that contemporary European trends, most evident in the rising secularization of nineteenth-century society, provided a more viable foundation for a global ethic than one grounded in the One, whom Doestoevsky called simply the Russian Christ. Throughout, Friesen captures a sense of the depth and sheer loveliness of Dostoevsky's canon.

Author: Leonard G. Friesen
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 05/15/2016
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.69d
ISBN: 9780268028978

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/18/2016
Choice 03/01/2017

About the Author
Leonard G. Friesen is associate professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is the author of Rural Revolutions in Southern Ukraine: Peasants, Nobles, and Colonists, 1774-1905.