Self love is an inescapable problem for ethics, yet much of
contemporary ethics is reluctant to offer any normative moral
anthropologies. Instead, secular ethics and contemporary
culture promote a norm of self-realization which is subjective
and uncritical. Christian ethics also fails to provide easy or
direct resources to address this problem, because it tends to
investigate self love with respect to conflicts between the self ’s
interests and those of her neighbors. Self Love and Christian
Ethics explicates and defends right self love by casting it as
a problem of proper self-relation that intersects with love
for God and love for neighbor. This book argues that right
self love entails a true self-understanding that is embodied
in the person’s concrete acts and relations. In making this
argument, it calls ethics to revisit ontological accounts of the
self and to devote more attention to particular moral acts.