{ "item_title" : "Ordo Amoris The Order of Love", "item_author" : [" Alan Bennett "], "item_description" : "What do we owe to those closest to us, and what do we owe to the stranger?The Order of Love: Ordo Amoris examines an ancient moral idea that has returned to modern political debate. The Latin phrase ordo amoris, usually translated as the order of love, suggests that love is not merely a feeling but has a structure: our responsibilities are shaped by relationships, duties, circumstances and the claims of those who depend upon us. Yet the idea immediately raises questions. Does loving those nearest to us justify giving them priority? Can national loyalty coexist with obligations to outsiders? When does proper preference become exclusion?The book begins with the public controversy that revived the phrase in 2025, when JD Vance invoked ordo amoris in discussing immigration and Pope Francis responded by directing attention to the Good Samaritan and the moral claim of the stranger. Rather than treating that exchange as a contest between simple opposites, Alan Bennett asks what the inherited idea actually means, how it developed, and how far it can responsibly be used in contemporary argument.The inquiry moves back to the Christian sources that shaped the tradition. It considers the teaching of Jesus on neighbour-love, Augustine's account of rightly and wrongly ordered love, and Aquinas' later treatment of charity, duty, mercy, justice and prudence. It also examines how an idea changes as it passes through centuries of interpretation. What belongs to its original meaning? What was added later? How should authority, tradition and changing circumstances affect the way an ancient moral principle is understood today?Bennett approaches these questions with the habits of a lawyer as well as those of a moral inquirer. Ancient texts do not interpret themselves, and quotations cannot simply be lifted from one age and applied mechanically to another. Meaning requires attention to context, purpose, development and the limits of the authority being invoked. The book therefore becomes not only an examination of ordo amoris but also a study of responsible interpretation itself.The final part tests the idea against some of the hardest practical questions of modern public life: family and strangers, national responsibility, immigration, refugees, domestic welfare and foreign aid. These examples reveal why neither our own first nor the neediest first can function as a complete moral formula. Duties arise from different sources. Some come from family, citizenship, law or office; others from vulnerability, injustice, urgent need or common humanity. They may conflict, and no slogan can remove the need for judgment.The central argument is that ordered love recognises real differences in responsibility without turning those differences into measures of human worth. Love has order, but order is not exclusion. Duties differ, but dignity remains. A government may have special responsibilities to its citizens without being morally indifferent to refugees or migrants. A person may owe particular duties to family without becoming blind to the suffering of strangers. Concern for the wider world need not dissolve responsibility to the neighbour close at hand.Ordo amoris, on this account, is not a ladder permanently ranking every person and every cause. Nor is it an algorithm that supplies automatic answers. It is a discipline of judgment. It asks what is owed, to whom, by whom, in what circumstances, under what limits, and with what regard for justice, mercy, prudence and human dignity.Written for the general reader, The Order of Love brings together law, philosophy, Christian moral thought and contemporary public policy. It is an inquiry into how inherited ideas should be understood before they are turned into political slogans, and into how we might preserve both particular responsibility and universal human concern in a world where the claims upon us are many, unequal and often in tension.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/819/207/9798192072875_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "19.99", "online_price" : "19.99", "our_price" : "19.99", "club_price" : "19.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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