Love, Delight, and Friendship

I love this excerpt from Elizabeth Newman in Untamed Hospitality:

"Use of the word love in our dominant cultural context can ring all sorts of bells. Love easily brings to mind sentimental and romantic connotations; love, from this perspective, refers to our private emotional lives and desires.  Christian love does not negate desire. In fact, as David B. Hart has emphasized, divine beauty inflames desire, stretching one 'out toward an even greater embrace of divine glory."  She adds, "Education has to do with cultivating the right kinds of desires, the right kinds of loves...That we are created for communion with God and others means that we are part of a tradition in which we are dependent on others (including those not explicitly within our tradition) to demonstrate to us what we are to be. Such a politics does not depend on individualism but rather on friendship. In fact, education made possible by friendship can be described as the circulation of gift...what matters is that we delight in the politics of belonging to each other and Christ, a politics that certainly might make us look strange to the modern/postmodern world."