"'To be or not to be' is no longer the sum of the matter... Rather, the supreme question is: 'To love or not to love.' In other words, love replaces being-as-power as the highest category. For in the degree that one is not in love, one is deficient in being... Instead of the Cartesian self-grounding of 'I think, therefore I am,' beginning with God's love means 'I am loved, therefore I am.' The birth of a self... is a bestowal of [love]... A self is born not only in and through (receiving) love, but equally, reciprocally, in and through (giving) love to others... I love in order to be."
James Olthuis (from The Hermeneutics of Charity)
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