Bernard Shaw, Paul Ricoeur, and the Jesusian Dialectics of Redemptive Living

This book explores a heretofore unremarked linkage between Bernard Shaw, the twentieth-century French thinker Paul Ricoeur, and Jesus of Nazareth. The ties that bind them are a foundational interest in the social teachings of the Nazarene and their use of a shared dialectics with respect to living the kind of compassionate life that holds out the promise in our contemporary world of achieving something approximating universal wellness on a healthy planet at peace with itself. This work argues that the three principal subjects of the study—independently of one another—used the same dialectical method to reach the same dialectically derived conclusion about how humans can live redemptively in a fractured world. Acknowledgments Contents Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Dialectics Plato (428/427 or 424/423–348/347 BC) Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) Karl Marx (1818–1883) Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Chapter 3: The Wisdom-Power Dialectic Chapter 4: The Ethics-Morality Dialectic Chapter 5: The Ideology-Utopia Dialectic Chapter 6: The Theism-Atheism Dialectic Chapter 7: Summation and Closing Thoughts Works Cited Index