Julia Meszaros
St Patrick's College, Maynooth, Theology, Department Member
- Julia lectures at St Patrick's Pontifical University, Maynooth, Ireland. She previously spent four years as a researc... moreJulia lectures at St Patrick's Pontifical University, Maynooth, Ireland. She previously spent four years as a researcher at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Louvain), Belgium and has a DPhil from Oxford.edit
The Introduction starts from the observation that sacrifice has been an obsession of modernity. This is subsequently explicated through a survey of approaches to sacrifice from the 16th century. Three contexts are explored in particular:... more
The Introduction starts from the observation that sacrifice has been an obsession of modernity. This is subsequently explicated through a survey of approaches to sacrifice from the 16th century. Three contexts are explored in particular: the theological debate following the Reformation; the reception of Greek tragedy; the encounter with non-European practices of sacrifice in the wake of the age of discovery. There are evident overlaps between the three, and yet they have to be seen as in a way separate factors ensuring the abiding fascination of the modern West with the notion of sacrifice.
Research Interests:
This article seeks to discern how, in spite of our fallenness, we can come to desire what is good. Judging desire and vision to be interdependent faculties, it finds that human reason alone is incapable of generating ‘good’ desire.... more
This article seeks to discern how, in spite of our fallenness, we can come to desire what is good. Judging desire and vision to be interdependent faculties, it finds that human reason alone is incapable of generating ‘good’ desire. Rather, desire must be transformed gradually and in relation to human vision. To this end, and drawing on James Alison and Iris Murdoch, particular practices are offered whose strength lies in focusing less on altering the objects than the quality of human vision and desire.
Research Interests:
In an age of self-affirmation and self-assertion, 'selfless love' can appear as a threat to the lover's personal well-being. This perception jars with the Biblical promise that we gain our life through losing it and therefore calls for a... more
In an age of self-affirmation and self-assertion, 'selfless love' can appear as a threat to the lover's personal well-being. This perception jars with the Biblical promise that we gain our life through losing it and therefore calls for a theological response. In conversation with the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and the atheistic moral philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch enquires into the anthropological grounds on which selfless love can be said to build up, rather than undermine, the lover's self. It proposes that while the implausibility of selfless love was furthered by the modern deconstruction of the self, both Tillich and Murdoch utilize this very deconstruction towards explicating and restoring the link between selfless love and human flourishing.
Julia T. Meszaros shows that they use the modern diagnosis of the human being's lack of a stable and independent self as manifest in Sartre's existentialism in support of an understanding of the self as relational and fallen. This leads them to view a loving orientation away from self and a surrender to the other as critical to the full flourishing of human selfhood. In arguing that Tillich and Murdoch defend the link between selfless love and human flourishing through reference to the human being's ontological selflessness, Meszaros closely engages Søren Kierkegaard's earlier attempt to keep selfless love and human flourishing in a productive, dialectical tension. She also examines the breakdown of this tension in the later figures of Anders Nygren, Simone Weil, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and addresses the pitfalls of this breakdown. Her examination concludes by arguing that the link between selfless love and human flourishing would be strengthened by a more resolute endorsement of a personal God, and of the reciprocal nature of selfless love.
Julia T. Meszaros shows that they use the modern diagnosis of the human being's lack of a stable and independent self as manifest in Sartre's existentialism in support of an understanding of the self as relational and fallen. This leads them to view a loving orientation away from self and a surrender to the other as critical to the full flourishing of human selfhood. In arguing that Tillich and Murdoch defend the link between selfless love and human flourishing through reference to the human being's ontological selflessness, Meszaros closely engages Søren Kierkegaard's earlier attempt to keep selfless love and human flourishing in a productive, dialectical tension. She also examines the breakdown of this tension in the later figures of Anders Nygren, Simone Weil, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and addresses the pitfalls of this breakdown. Her examination concludes by arguing that the link between selfless love and human flourishing would be strengthened by a more resolute endorsement of a personal God, and of the reciprocal nature of selfless love.