Man, My Beloved: A Christian Case for Falling in Love with Your Friends

Drawing on such thinkers as Aristotle, Bonaventure, John Henry Newman, Christos Yannaras, and John Paul II, I argued for reimagining friendship as a necessarily erotic relationship.

This weekend, I presented a paper at the Fall Conference for the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame. My paper was titled, “Man, My Beloved: A Catholic Case for Falling in Love with Your Friends.” Drawing on such thinkers as Aristotle, Bonaventure, John Henry Newman, Christos Yannaras, and John Paul II, I argued for reimagining friendship as a necessarily erotic relationship. In today’s culture, conversations about love and eros have become almost entirely subsumed into the topics of sexuality and marriage. I hoped to give a renewed account of eros as that which draws man out of himself and gives birth in creativity, demonstrating the ways in which becoming friends really is a process of falling in love.

I ran short on time at the conference, so I had to cut down some of what I presented. But you can listen to a recording from my talk below!