New volume on neighbor-love

Who is your neighbor? How can we foster neighborliness and community with our neighbors? Neighborly relations can be understood in the small, personal context and in the large, between different countries. An international group of researchers explores the concepts of neighbor-love in Neighborliness. Poetics, Politics, and Practices of Neighbor-Love. They present a wide range of approaches that integrate concepts from Western philosophy and literary studies, phenomenology, theology, psychoanalysis and political theory.

The figure of the neighbor — whether in the guise of the Good Samaritan, an adversary, a traitor, an injured person in need of help, or simply an indifferent everyman — embodies the relationship between the individual, community, and sovereignty. But who qualifies as a neighbor? And what are we to make of the different conceptions of neighborly love and community across the boundaries of culture, ethics, and faith? These questions are fundamental to contemporary debates about war, migration, and shifting scapegoating mechanisms — and to the challenges we all face as neighbors.

Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA Kenneth Reinhard has read the volume:

–This important collection takes the injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself” as the touchstone for the development of new interpretive, aesthetic, and ethical practices. The nature of “love,” the determination of “the neighbor,” and the reflexivity of “as oneself” are all questions rather than fixed designations here, and each has generated a complex, and often contradictory, interpretive history, which these authors examine and extend. These essays renew the force of the Biblical commandment by following key moments in the discourse of the neighbor in its theological, philosophical, and psychoanalytic explorations, its modern aesthetic and literary expressions (in Caravaggio, Kafka, Beckett, among others), and its contemporary socio-political implications for situations as disparate as the Covid pandemic and violence in Israel and Palestine. But what ultimately unites these varied and nuanced discussions is the conviction that there is a kernel of truth to neighbor-love, something both urgent and enigmatic that goes beyond any particular interpretive or religious tradition, and that offers us, in these dark times, renewed possibilities for thinking and acting in the world.

Editors: Irina Hron & Håkan Möller

Authors: Mats Andrén, Michael Azar, Christian Benne, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Irina Hron, Werner G. Jeanrond, Håkan Möller, Eric L. Santner, Caroline Sauter, Ola Sigurdson, Claudia Welz.

ISBN: 978-91-88763-66-2
ISBN (pdf): 978-91-88763-67-9
ISSN: 0348-1433
Published: July 2025
Soft cover
272 pages
Series: Konferenser 115
Price: 280 SEK

The volume is also available as open access.

Distribution via Eddy.se. Order or download.

More information:
Ulrika Gustafsson, Head of Publications, Editor, Kungl. Vitterhetsakademien, ulrika.gustafsson@vitterhetsakademien.se

The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (Vitterhetsakademien) advances and funds research in the humanities and social sciences and in cultural heritage management. Its work is financed by donations and by public and private foundations. Vitterhetsakademien also owns and manages several historic buildings and sites: Skånelaholm Castle in Uppland, Stjernsund Castle in Närke, Rettig House in Stockholm (which houses Vitterhetsakademien’s office), the villages of Stensjö in Småland and Borg and the ruins of Gråborg on Öland.

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