One of my very favourite organizations, the Hildebrand Project, has just released this little book titled The Personalism of John Paul II.
I read it today and here’s the brief review I wrote of it on Amazon:
This book is wonderfully accessible and still packed with all of the key themes in John Paul II’s philosophy of the human person. Dr. Crosby gives an excellent overview of the man to whom he beautifully refers as “a kind of prophet of personal dignity.”
John Paul II teaches us that the human person is a being to whom the adequate way to relate is love. Persons have an objective and subjective existence, i.e., we exist in the world with others and we exist with a personal interiority as well. Human persons are free and, at the same time, our freedom is circumscribed by the law of truth about the good. Paradoxically, we fulfill ourselves through giving ourselves away in acts of self-gift which are made possible by the sovereignty we have over ourselves to, in a sense, create ourselves through taking acts of responsibility. We are embodied and so we want to avoid reducing ourselves to the world, i.e., a merely cosmological or biologically reductionist view AND, at the same time, we want to avoid any sort of spiritualist view that would ‘disincarnate’ persons from the fact of our embodied existence. Finally, the human person always exists as an individual in community and so we are called to solidarity against the depersonalizing poles of both individualism and collectivism.
If you’re looking for an excellent primer that unpacks these ideas in an inviting and elevating way, you’ll love this.
To order it, click here.
Amanda Achtman 