Is all love just a kind of narcissism?

September 14, 2026 Mark Brians

*p/c Ferdinand Schmutzer (1870–1928), public domain, courtesy of wikimedia commons*

Sigmund Freud did not believe in love —did not believe that humans were capable of it. “He insisted that it was the illusory result of a narcissistic passion for one’s own I, or rather, one’s own narcissistic ideal” Mossimo Recalcati explains (2021, p.9).

Freud, according to Recalcati, “believed that to love means nothing more than to adore one’s own ideal image embodied by the beloved” (ibid). Thus when someone says “I love you” what Freud believed was actually going-on was nothing more the person declaring “‘I love myself through you’” (ibid).

Now, enough of us have experienced the brokenness of sin to know that this is sometimes true…

Maui sermon notes

September 3, 2024 Mark Brians

This past Sunday I took the 6:19 am flight to Kahului to preach and celebrate Holy Communion at Kingsfield Anglican Church. They have their service at 10 AM and All Saints has ours at 4 PM so it allows me to be at both parishes in a single Sunday —which is both exhausting and incredibly life-giving.

This week I preached two different sermons: one on Mark 7 at All Saints and one on Acts 9 at Kingsfield (they’ve been going through the Book of Acts for a while now and so I jumped-in where they were in the series). Since the folks at All Saints didn’t get to hear the sermon, I thought I’d post one strand of reflections from my preaching notes:

The Cross is the heart of the world

May 8, 2023 Mark Brians

Reality is cruciform. It takes the shape of the Cross.

Da Blog