Agape is just as foundational as justice for the existence, proper functioning, and sustainability of socioeconomic life. In the same way that justice has a crucial function in the marketplace, agape also has its unique and vital role to play. The marketplace requires the tandem of agape and justice working hand in hand if it is to exist at all, much less thrive. We see this in critical areas that shape the character and quality of socioeconomic life: institutional preconditions; value formation and development of customs, law, and usage; triage and pursuit of economic goals; and frictional and transaction costs.

Agape-justice conflicts can arise from unattended past wrongs and previous disequilibria in socioeconomic homeostasis. We see this both in theory and in practice. This is sometimes called “prior-fault” moral dilemmas. There is an important time- and place-utility to the claims of justice and agape. These dues have multiple dimensions that must be satisfied simultaneously: giving the right claim, the right amount, at the right time, to the right recipient, from the right payer, at the right place, and in the right manner. Deficiencies in any of these contribute to disequilibria in the delicate socioeconomic homeostasis.

The longing for love and the possibility of its loss are consistent concerns in Ishiguro’s production. Through references to ancient and modern conceptualizations, the chapter addresses the varieties of love that dominate Ishiguro’s works. It moves from the guilt-ridden love of a mother for her suicided daughter in A Pale View of Hills, through Stevens’s barely acknowledged love for Miss Kenton in Remains of the Day, to the unresolved tension between the devotion to our nearest and dearest and the pursuit of a higher ideal in The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans. After minor excursions into songwriting and short stories, the chapter focuses on the most recent three novels, considering the deceptive possibility of romantic love’s redemptive power in Never Let Me Go, the long-standing but apparently doomed conjugal love of Axl and Beatrice in The Buried Giant, and Klara’s touching devotion to the sick Josie in Klara and the Sun.

Eriugena’s concept of love seems to be twofold. On the one hand, he adopts the Platonic concept of love (ἔρως). It is well known that the Platonic eros stands ‘between’ the lover and the loved. Of course, its function is anagogic but, therefore, eros, as a mediator, cannot be conceived of as God himself. On the other hand, Eriugena states that the Absolute loves itself. To be sure, God’s self-referential love is not egoistic but caritative, soteriological and eschatological. It is the outcome, in short, of divine providence (ἀγάπη). Eriugena follows Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, his most important intellectual precursor, and combines both concepts of love. But how, we must ask, can he combine both concepts? How can these two different concepts become one? Or is their difference only an apparent one? We shall answer these crucial questions by considering the two most important concepts of Eriugena’s metaphysics: the transcendence and immanence of the Absolute, or God. Thinkers tend to put these terms in diametrical opposition, but this view, besides leading to confusion, is fundamentally mistaken.

Charity has a rich association with European international law. As a Christian virtue, charity drove the imperial exploits of Christian missions during the Age of Discovery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is when the early Christian writers of a modern, European international law such as Francisco de Vitoria (1486–1546), Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), Richard Zouche (1590–1661), Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Cornelis van Bynkershoek (1673–1743) emerged, and the Peace of Westphalia is said to have established a law of nations amongst “a European society of sovereign states.” Christian charity, it was believed, offered non-Christian peoples in the “New World” eternal salvation, and it became a prime justification for the universalization of a European international law – all of which Anghie points out resulted from the process by which European doctrines and beliefs “were transferred to, or imposed upon, the non-European world, principally through the mechanism of colonialism.”

In addition to the senses in which God’s sovereignty is “powerful” intrinsically in God’s glory and in creative blessing, it is “powerful” in two other senses in the registers of eschatological blessing and reconciliation of the estranged.Those two senses cannot be conflated because, while they are rooted in canonical narratives of God relating by way of Incarnation, they have irreducibly different narrative logics. The differences between these senses of “power” is brought out by analysis of implications of the different taxis in which the “Persons” of the Trinity are engaged in each strand of the economy. Each expresses different qualities of the ‘power’ of God’s intrinsic sovereignty. Each brings with it a different vocabulary in which to characterize God’s power. So appropriate accounts of God’s power must stammer, shifting unsystematically among those vocabularies.

This chapter, on beauty, explores the desirability and splendor of creatures as a participation in divine beauty and goodness. It is, at heart, an exploration of what to love, and how to love it. In the words of an ancient prayer, the message is one of loving God 'above all things, and in all things'. As a contrasting position, we consider the vision of the Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren. Unlike his appeal for us to sever love for God from love for creatures, the vision in this chapter is integrative. The tendency is considered, all the same, for human waywardness in how we love, and the order of our loving. While the reality of sin and the need for restraint are recognised, the characteristics of a 'participatory spirituality' are seen not to be founded on denial or rejection: what Martin Buber calls one of 'subtraction ... or reduction'. The focus for the chapter is for the most part what could be called the beauty of goodness. It concludes with a discussion of the participatory character of aesthetic beauty.

The final chapters of this book look at how a participatory outlook can inform and has informed a vision of the world and what it means to live, act, pray, and seek God in it. This, the first of these chapters, considers knowledge and knowing in participatory terms. Knowledge is seen as a participation of the knower in the known, or a sharing from the known to the knower. This undergirds a 'realist' epistemology, in that knowing rests on the reality of the thing that is known. That said, it also stresses the creaturehood and particularity of the knower and the manner of knowing: that which is known comes to be in the knower in the manner of the knower, whether we are talking about our knowledge of an animal, of a plant, or of God. In the case of God, most of all, the knower never exhausts the depths of what is known. That also applies, however, although to a different degree, in the knowledge of even mundane things, since their deepest reality is a participation in God, which confers a creaturely form of inexhaustibility. In these ways, much of this chapter is an exploration of 'intra-finite participation': about how one creature participates in, or donates to, another. It closes with a discussion of the relation between reason and revelation.