FOOTNOTE: June 2026
Greetings again:
Love. This is one of the 102 topics and chapters of the Great Books of the
Western World in the Great Ideas Syntopicon volume 2 and 3 of the Great
Books encyclopedic set. There, in Chapter 50 we find, as Ed McMahon
used to say on the Tonight Show, “Just everything you would ever want to
know about Love…contained in this one chapter.” And to which Johnny
Carson would reply… “Not quite…martini-breath.”
In the Syntopicon chapter we have an overview of all the aspects written
about Love and how some of the writers within the Great Books volumes
view it. After that comes the Outline of Topics [of Love] such as, The
Nature of Love, the Kinds of Love, the Morality of Love, the Social or
political force of Love, sympathy or friendship, Divine Love, and all these
are broken down as well. Then finally we have an index to what all those
writers have to say about love in the volumes that follow.
Ministers, Dali Lamas, Popes, and your every day teachers, and
Psychologists have been trying to teach us how to love one another for a
long time.
A Unitarian minister, John Corrado said, “Loving is hard, liking is easy.”
Another minister, Ray Stedman, has asked in another sermon, “Which is
harder, loving people whom you do not like, or loving people who do not
like you?
The Syntopicon is like this last question. On love, it covers some of the
objects of curiosity and conflict; loyalties of love and obligations of justice;
heroism of friendship and sacrifices of love; the fraternity of citizenship;
comparison of love and justice in relation to the common good; self love in
relation to the love of others; power of love as a constructive or destructive
force. This outline is really an enormous study about love, without all the
writings about it.
Of course, most of us are aware of the passage, John 15:12-17.
This is my commandment; that you love one another as I have
loved you. Greater love has no man than this; that a man lay down his
life for his friends…
We see a lot of this going on. Rescue workers taking risks, sometimes
fatal, in order to keep someone else alive.
Paul T. Jackson
Revised June, 2026
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