Book Reviews
Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith
6/1/2005
Brander is an international journalist, photographer, teacher, and author. His main interests are travel and social psychology. He has been a staff writer on newspapers in New Zealand and the United States and a writer-editor for National Geographic. Through the years, Brander has continued his studies in the fields of social and cultural trends in the Western world with particular emphasis on sociology, psychology, history, anthropology, and current events.
Brander has studied love, one of his favorite topics, for over thirty years. This book is result of that study. As a testimony to his expertise, he has been married to his wife Mary for nearly twenty years.
Brander has taken an interesting approach to the topic of love and romance. He has divided his subject matter into two equal parts. Part I is Love in the Dark; Part II, Love for Life. Brander draws on theology, philosophy, history, literature, psychology, and sociology to demonstrate why romance alone is a very poor basis for a stable love and a lasting relationship.
In Part I, he points out that during the twentieth century, romance was basically very sweet and safe; people moderated its temptations with other types of love that are all but forgotten in our time. Today love for most lovers has degenerated into uncontrolled, sexual, hot wishful fantasies or as Brander puts it, "scratching a sexual itch." He asks us to look at ourselves. We are looking for the perfect person, the image of the one we want to love. Yet Brander makes the point of implying that we ourselves are not healthy and therefore not ready for a new relationship. He says that we look for the ideal person but when we find that person we realize that he or she is looking for the perfect person also. He makes the point that we are more likely to be consumers rather then producers of love. He indicates that nothing is life fails as often and as miserably as love. So the question is where does the failure lie? The failure may lie, Brander indicates, in the vastly incomplete romantic love that we practice, with its wishes and fantasies.
In Part II, Branders says to make relationships work again, we need to understand the dynamics of love and rediscover types of love that are linked to higher levels of emotional maturity. The English word "love" is the most misused and ill-defined word in the English language. Brander goes on to define the biblical definitions of love used by the Greeks, i.e., eros, philia, and agape. He says that too many of us are stuck in a level of love that the Greeks called eros which is the urgent desire for self-fulfillment that is most often associated with sexual or sensual love. This type of love leads us to reach out for something or someone to make ourselves more complete. In personal relationships, eros love says, "I want it, I need it, therefore I love."
The next higher level of love is philia. In philia the object of love becomes important in its own right, Brander explains, not merely someone to be used, but someone valued for his or her own sake. This kind of love emphasizes giving more then getting.
The highest level of love, agape, is "true love," in which the lover has the welfare of the one being loved as the primary motive. Agape is a decision and a commitment to love; it is giving unconditional love. In eros we marry the person we love. In agape we love the person we marry.
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Living Church, The - Milwaukee, Wisconsin
5/15/2005
Bruce Brander has presented a treatise on love stemming from his experience as social philosopher, professor, and human being. Thus he reveals with expertise: "Anyone today embarking upon the perilous course of love feeling certain of happily-ever-after would seem either reckless or naïve. Old-time hopes of life-long, loving bliss have turned unrealistic. Instead, we are guarded, suspicious, made so by what we see and experience of love…we see love and its consequences tormenting people with some of the cruelest misfortunes of their lives."
In Love That Works, Bruce Brander has given a perspective useful for the ministry of parish nurses; that is, he has set forth the connections among body, mind, and spirit. Other pastoral leaders will find opportunities for augmenting the author’s ideas with soteriology. In addition, it seems to these reviewers that lack of love can be as deadly as the diseases which plague us. When we are not nurtured and, similarly when we do not nurture each other, our spirits die. We are empty emotionally, our physical health suffers. To love others and to allow ourselves to be loved is worth the risk set before us by Prof. Brander, who has given us a fine book.
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Scientific and Medical Network, The - Gloucestershire, United Kingdom
3/20/2005
The first of two new books about the science-love interface published by Templeton Press. This one is the more wide-ranging and its subtitle immediately reveals the direction it takes. In the early part of the book he reviews the changing context of romance over the past century as it reflects shifts in the whole culture: ’from religious to secular; from duty-centered to self-centered; from humane to indifferent; from stress on responsibilities to emphasis on rights; from supportive community to impersonal society; from serving, contributing and co-operating to competing and consuming.’ Brander uses as a framework the classic distinctions between eros, phila, and agape as the expression of love moves from need to giving. The discussion is stimulating and erudite, drawing on a number of disciplines, and his conclusions have important implications for the development of a more general understanding of love. A notable contribution to this emerging field.
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Christian Science Monitor, The
2/9/2005
NEW YORK - Pop songs and breakups are enough to make anyone question the true nature of love. Why does it endure in some cases but not in others? How do couples make it last? Author and journalist Bruce Brander offers some answers appropriate for Valentine’s month in his recent book, "Love That Works: The Art and Science of Giving."
Born of decades of research and conversations, "Love That Works" delivers a succinct assessment of what’s wrong with the way people love today and how they can grow to have better relations with significant others and even strangers in grocery store lines.
Among its pages are the insights of philosophers, psychologists, and religious thinkers accumulated by Mr. Brander during his more than 30 years of study.
His motive in writing the book was compassion, "to spare people the suffering that I saw that was going on so prevalently," Brander says in a phone interview from his home in Colorado Springs, Colo.
"We don’t talk much about the travails of broken romances … it’s one of the best-kept secrets in our society," explains Brander, who had his own brushes with "distressing romances" before marrying.
What most people do wrong, he suggests, is equate romance with love, not realizing it’s only a steppingstone. Romance - the head-over-heels, can’t-think-about-anything-else kind - is self-oriented and doomed to fizzle if not built upon. It draws people together and jump-starts love, but that’s it, he says. "We expect romance to carry the whole weight of love. We shouldn’t stop there, and our society tells us to stop there."
In his view, the media and society keep people at the selfish level by promoting looking out for No. 1 and encouraging them to view love as a commodity, as something to be consumed, rather than expressed. That cultivates emotional responses that are narrow and needy.
Brander points to one psychoanalyst who suggests that a culture’s love relationships are simply a reflection of that society’s human relationships in general. He sees potential for more than that. "Instead of only falling in love," he writes, "we also can rise to love."
The author starts by defining love the way the ancient Greeks did, with not one word but three. The first is eros - which Brander calls a self-focused, beginner-level love. ("Eros says I want, I need - therefore I love. In that sense, it sounds like a pop song," he writes.) Next is philia - a type of friendship, or we-centered love, that looks out for the wants and needs of others. And finally agape - a "no strings attached," unconditional giving. (Think Mother Teresa, or a mother and a newborn.)
His discussions of agape love delve into the beliefs of Christianity and other religions with regard to the word. But he says the book is not religious per se. "I mention religion simply because they trumpet the cause the loudest," he says.
He calls agape and philia "higher loves," which are serene and stable and not nearly as exciting as the beginning eros romance (and discussed less frequently). Being in love is "a passive and personal emotional state," he says, but loving is "an active effort to aid someone."
"Marriages that succeed get into these higher loves," he says. "It’s just more generous, where the other person is important in his own right, rather than just an instrument for my wants and needs."
Those higher loves are attainable now, Brander says. But they take practice and effort. Loving differently means having a more generous, kinder, less-acquisitive approach toward everybody and not just one person, he suggests. That’s what will help people rise above the current level of relationships and develop their spiritual and emotional being.
"It’s very simple," he adds. "Not easy, but simple."
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Christianity Today
11/1/2004
"The way we love is not working anymore," believes social philosophy and travel author Bruce Brander, who has studied the topic more than 30 years.
Failed love, he says, remains one of life’s most devastating experiences, often ending in damaged souls and divorce. "While modern romancing masquerades as preparation for marriage, it functions better as training for infidelity," he writes.
What is the answer? Although scientists attempt to research and understand love, Brander finds that "poets, philosophers, and storytellers do a better job explaining love than [do] scientists with their rigorous empirical methods."
After offering a brief history of romantic love, Brander explores three kinds of love (agape, eros, philia), then looks at the enemies of love, including jealousy, neglect, criticism, perfectionism, and especially dishonesty, which he says deflects and poisons love.
When we love, he writes, we must reach high, "be as generous as possible as often as possible," and make serving the greatest good of the other the major goal. If we follow Jesus’ commandment to "love one another," we can, in doing so, change our own small parts of the world.
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