Fannie Bialek

Love cannot be everlasting, much as we might desire it to be so. So, what is love in a life that begins and ends? How does it feel to love as a finite being, imperfectly as we may? In Western philosophy and religious thought, love has often been characterized as a source of constancy and commitment. Love in Time reveals the opposite to be true. From the ways our beloveds (and their qualities that endear them to us) change over time, to the possibility of our feelings toward our beloveds-or their feelings toward us-changing, love, Bialek shows, is an endeavor fraught with uncertainty. Yet it is that very uncertainty that entices us to our beloveds. Love is not a refuge from the vagaries of worldly life, impervious to its changing conditions. Rather, it is an orientation to a future that we do not yet know. In this book, Fannie Bialek explores the temporal experience of lovers spending time with their beloveds. Love in time, like any temporal experience, is composed of moments of not knowing what will happen next. It is an experience of vulnerability in this way, the lover exposed to an unknown future and waiting to see how it plays out. Attending to these vulnerabilities, Love in Time develops a fresh ethics of love that centers uncertainty and humility. It is an ethics of love that speaks to the uncertainty of the present and beyond.

Wounds teach us what we were vulnerable to and what vulnerabilities we may yet bear. But wounds are often met with doubt and disbelief, suggesting that their lessons may be hard to learn. Through an analysis of advocacy movements to believe victims of sexual assault set in conversation with Caravaggio’s Incredulity of Thomas, this paper argues for an understanding of vulnerability as part of a process of learning from wounds that is sometimes marked by emotional incredulity, an expression of doubt or denial of what one knows to be true because of the way its realization feels. Emotional incredulity in these circumstances is not a denial of vulnerability that pretends to mastery, but one that expresses the challenge of learning, together, how much we do not know of ourselves.

Religious ethics was founded on a commitment to inclusion, welcoming projects from and about different religious and philosophical traditions. This paper argues that the increasing welcome of feminist ethics in the JRE also reveals a tension in the field between inclusion and critique: where feminist ethics is included as another tradition of ethical inquiry, its critical claims can be escaped by appeal to difference from the traditions it seeks to engage. The response to feminist critique should not be to applaud its inclusion without responding to its claims. Where this occurs, religious ethicists must renegotiate the terms of inclusion and the borders of difference. Feminist critique thus requires a return to founding questions of this journal, and the field, about the terms on which different traditions can be discussed and engaged in a common, critical conversation of religious ethics.