Paper Short Abstract:

This paper considers love as an ethics or model for action in Emmanuel, a French Catholic charismatic intentional community. Exploring the model of change that is implied in Emmanuel's ethics of love, I consider the ways in which it enriches anthropological thought on agency, action, and change.

Paper Abstract:

This paper considers love as an ethics or model for action in the world, as expressed in the case of Emmanuel, a French Catholic charismatic intentional community and its development NGOs. Conceived of not as that which unites and brings together, but as an openness to the alterity of the other, I argue that love in the case of Emmanuel is fundamentally conceived of in terms of change. The model of change implied in this ethics, however, emerges as remarkably passive and un-dramatic. Within this framework, to act upon the world is achieved not by exercising one’s own agency or will, but by means of embodying, demonstrating, or circulating divine presence, or what members of Emmanuel come to refer to as “being a sign” of God’s love. By exploring the curious model of action that Emmanuel’s ethics of love gives rise to, I consider the ways in which it challenges and enriches anthropological thought on agency, action, and change, and the relationship between them.