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Impossible Loves
Back when belief in predestination was powerful, there was only one way life could go. Today we have a stronger sense of contingency and find ourselves clinging to lost loves, missed opportunities, and other lives we might have lived. Don Cupitt meditates on the religious significance of all our many lost and impossible loves. The impossible, he says, has replaced the supernatural in our thinking.
Over the past decade, Cupitt has attempted to reinvent religious thought because, he says, “It has become obvious that not one of the major religious traditions can survive in the present form." He points out that there has been a general shift from organized religion to a new spirituality. In this transient scene we each have a brief part to play, we each need to find a lifestyle through which we can become whole and learn to do our own thing in our own way. Through ardent world-love, Cupitt believes we can work out our salvation and, at the same time, make life more valuable for those who will succeed us.
Impossible Loves examines the role that may be played in our lives by various impossible loves, whether for non-existent objects, unavailable persons, or unattainable ideals. This noted scholar guides us through this process like no one else can. He sees the task of religion today as being to help us to say Amen to our own contingent lives, however they happen to turn out.
"Cupitt presents the possibility of embracing and living out the radical contingency of human life. With a plainspoken brilliance rooted in a well furnished intellect, he provokes, cajoles, and entices us to recognize what we already know but mostly hide from ourselves."— Thomas Sheehan, Stanford University |
Polebridge Press
120 pages, paperback, $18
2007 ISBN 978-1-59815-001-8
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For other Polebridge books by Don Cupitt, click here.