Herein is Love: A Study of the Biblical Doctrine of Love in Its Bearing on Personality, Parenthood, Teaching, and All Other Human Relationships.Howe, Reuel L.
Religion
Herein is Love: A Study of the Biblical Doctrine of Love in Its Bearing on Personality, Parenthood, Teaching, and All Other Human Relationships.
Howe, Reuel L.
Love -- Religious aspects -- Christianity
When the human being is born, he leaves the biological exchange of the
womb for the social exchange system of his society, where his gradually
increasing capacities meet the opportunities and limitations of his
culture. The appearance of the person, therefore, results from the
dialogue between himself and his environment, between his growing,
autonomous self and the directing community upon which he is dependent.
This dialogue between the individual and his environment often has, as
we have seen, the characteristics of a conflict. The individual
challenges and makes demands of his family, and the family challenges
and makes demands of the child. Each wrestles with the problems of trust
in relation to the other, each wrestles for autonomy that is equal to
the domination of the other, each strives for the initiative and
industriously competes with the other, and each seeks an identity that
may either exclude or include the other. The quality of the life of the
individual and of the social order depends upon the results of the
dialogue between them.
I am thinking of two families. In one, the parents helped their children
work through their difficulties with each other, thus assuming
dialogical responsibility for what happened between them. In late
teenhood, each child in turn became a person in his own right who had
achieved a relatively mature, congenial, and loving relation with every
other member of the family. In the second family, the parents could not
face the conflicts inevitable to human nature in a growing family, and
pretended a quality of relationship that did not exist between them.
When their children became late teen-agers and older, a smoldering
antagonism existed between them which occasionally broke out in venomous
quarrels. The parents of this second family had not assumed dialogical
responsibility for the content of their family life, with the result
that the interaction between the growing person and his environment was
not creative.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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