Transcendent Love

<p>In <i>Transcendent Love: Dostoevsky and the Search for a Global Ethic</i> Leonard G. Friesen ranges widely across Dostoevsky's stories novels journalism notebooks and correspondence to demonstrate how Dostoevsky engaged with ethical issues in his times and how those same issues continue to be relevant to today's ethical debates. Friesen contends that the Russian ethical voice in particular Dostoevsky's voice deserves careful consideration in an increasingly global discussion of moral philosophy and the ethical life. Friesen challenges the view that contemporary liberalism provides a religiously neutral foundation for a global ethic. He argues instead that Dostoevsky has much to offer when it comes to the search for a global ethic an ethic that for Dostoevsky was necessarily grounded in a Christian concept of an active extravagant and transcendent love. Friesen also investigates Dostoevsky's response to those who claimed that contemporary European trends most evident in the rising secularization of nineteenth-century society provided a more viable foundation for a global ethic than one grounded in the One whom Doestoevsky called simply the Russian Christ. Throughout Friesen captures a sense of the depth and sheer loveliness of Dostoevsky's canon.</p>