“Love cures people—both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.”
— Karl Menninger, U.S. psychiatrist, founder of the Menninger Clinicand author of Man Against Himself
ABOVE: Good Samaritan, Wood River Gallery/PNI by Fernand Schultz-Wettel.
|  |  Divine love was once considered the exclusive province of theology, but the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love has labored hard to promote the study of love as an empirical and scientific endeavor, as well. “It never occurred to me to really study love at the interface of theology, science and practice. Bringing science in was something that had not come to mind until I had the good fortune of encountering the Foundation,” says Post.
In 2002, after a competitive review process, the Institute awarded funds for science research grants to projects studying human development, neuroscience, the evolution of altruism and faith-based helping behaviors. Several researchers are showing that a kindly, charitable interest in others has health benefits for the agent, such as lower depression rates in adolescents and longer, healthier lives for older people. “It is important to understand the extent to which love is not just good for those who are loved but for those who do the loving. All religions teach that in the giving of self lies the discovery of self,” Post says.
In June 2003, more than 450 people from 33 countries attended the Works of Love: Scientific and Religious Perspective on Altruism, a major international, interfaith, interdisciplinary conference co-hosted by the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love and the Metanexus Institute on Science and Religion.
Currently, there are more than 20 books on kindness and a common humanity being written by authors the Institute sponsors. The Institute has already produced Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy; Religion in Dialogue; Unlimited Love – Altruism, Compassion and Service; and Research on Altruism & Love (an annotated bibliography), and was responsible for the republication of Pitirim Sorokin’s The Ways and Power of Love.
The Ways and Power of Love was originally published in 1954 when Sorokin, a Russian Orthodox sociologist, was leading the Harvard Research Center for Creative Altruism. While Sorokin pioneered the scientific analysis of love, Erik Erikson, a Protestant who studied moral development, advanced the field with his belief that the highest level of human development involved generativity, a kind of moral creativity in those who are older toward those who are younger.
Post has had a long-standing focus on agape love, altruism and compassion in the context of scientific research, philosophy, religion and ethics. He spent his boyhood days at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. Since the age of 16, he was interested in unlimited love as an “impossible possibility”—“The ultimate ideal of goodness but one that was not typically arrived at.” Years later in 1983, to complete his doctorate in philosophy and religious ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School’s Ethics and Society program, he would write his dissertation on the topic of self-denial in relation to other-regarding agape love.
Since then, he has been an active lay leader in the Episcopal Church and has published widely on love, both theologically and in the context of people with cognitive disabilities, and on the moral challenges of Alzheimer’s disease. He now writes the Institute’s free electronic monthly newsletter, which reaches more than 5,500 subscribers with news of scientific studies, announcements and publications on unlimited love. The idea, he explains, is to advance the dialogue between science, theology and then “the amazing practitioners of love who are both inspired and inspiring.”
With the scientific study of love still in its infancy, there is a range of topics that warrant further investigation. Scientists need to find the tools that can help us raise caring children and sustain benevolence in marriage. More research needs to be done on how young people and the elderly can find purpose in caring for each other. More attention needs to be paid to rescuers who put their lives on the line for strangers. With group conflicts threatening our future, we need to know how to elicit compassionate behaviors from catastrophic events, like September 11, 2001. At a time when hatred and war lead us to doubt the potential of unlimited love, those who know how important these issues are need to step up and push the field of unlimited
love forward.
“Unlimited love transcends all the fragmentation that plagues the world. I think that by strongly asserting that God is love, and studying the degree to which the nature of human beings can participate in that love, we basically get to what all particular religious, spiritual and moral traditions aim for,” Post says. “I think that love is our ultimate fulfillment, so there’s no dualism in my mind between a deep and abiding love of others and the happiness of the self. There is a correlation between unlimited love and true human happiness.”
For more information please visit: www.unlimitedloveinstitute.org
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