The Disciplined Heart

The Disciplined Heart
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The Disciplined Heart: Love, Destiny, and Imagination

Information on The Disciplined Heart from the publisher:

What is the nature of genuine human love? How does love affect who we are and who we are to become? These questions are the essence of Caroline Simon’s insightful new book on human affection. The Disciplined Heart presents an understanding of love in its various forms (self-love, neighbor love, friendship, friendship between sexes, romantic love and marital love) via various works fiction by authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Leo Tolstoy, Isak Dinesen and Wallace Stegner. Simon challenges philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s thesis that love is fiction-making but proposes that love is in fact an act of imagination. Genuine love, says Simon, requires imagination, the ability to see another’s self and destiny as God would have it. This imagination needs a trained and disciplined heart, for the undisciplined heart is prone to whimsical reactions and the fiction-making that is wishful, self-interested projection. It confuses love with love’s counterfeits: infatuation, manipulation, and sentimentality. The Disciplined Heart, on the other hand, sees the person’s true self, who he or she is and who he or she can become. Learned, astute and elegantly written, The Disciplined Heart is a groundbreaking work at the intersection of theology, philosophy, and literary analysis.

Description of Caroline J. Simon, author of The Disciplined Heart:

Much like The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis, Simon's illuminating book richly and insightfully probes the vagaries of human love through perceptive discussion of the works of theologians, philosophers, and novelists including Flannery O'Connor, Leo Tolstoy, William Kennedy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Eliot, and Isak Dinesen. 214 pages, softcover from Eerdmans.