“Morally Exemplary Friendships”: Wesley Hill looks for examples

at First Things:

…When I originally announced that I was working on a book about friendship, Ben Myers suggested I pick up Uncommon Friendships: An Amicable History of Modern Religious Thought by William Young. The book focuses on three pairs of friends—Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, and Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clément, all of whom were influential twentieth century religious thinkers—and tries to show how their particular friendships were essential to the intellectual work they accomplished. Ben’s comment to me, after passing along the recommendation, was, “I reckon someone ought to write a history of theology along these lines!” And that wouldn’t be hard to do: think of Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eberhard Bethge, and that’s not even venturing beyond a small slice of twentieth century German Protestantism!

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