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1 Introduction Of Circles, Lines, and Soup Tureens So far as I can reconstruct it, this book originated in frustrations with indexes, Google, and Amazon.com. For a decade or more, I have been intrigued by the way the concept of “the gift” has spread from cultural anthropology into philosophy and theology. I share the enthusiasm for this category, which helps us reconceive issues in theological ontology, ethics, and politics in fruitful ways.1 Twice I have taught courses on “Gift and Gratitude,” and have found that mulling over the ins and outs of gift giving is a delightful and illuminating way to get some serious business done. At the same time I have been frustrated by what seems to me a fairly obvious gap in the literature on gift. If gift is everywhere, if gift is everything, then one would think that responses to gifts would also be quite important. One would think there might be equal attention to gratitude. As I searched index after index for substantive discussions of gratitude, however, I largely came up empty. The most recent translation of Marcel Mauss’ The Gift does not list “gratitude” in its index. I came across Heidegger’s dictum denken ist danken (“to think is to thank,” one of those happy puns that works in both German and English!), but Richard Polt’s superb Heidegger: An Introduction has no entry for “gratitude.” Postmodern thought is obsessed with gifts, but there is no entry for “gratitude” in John Caputo and Michael Scanlan ’s collection of essays God, the Gift, and Postmodernism or in Caputo’s The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. (Derrida’s The Gift of Death does not even have an index, which raises frustrations of a different sort.) Theologian John Milbank has many illuminating things to say about gratitude, but the publishers of his Being Reconciled could not find it in themselves to make 2 ⌣ gratitude an entry for it in the index. Amazon.com searches were similarly fruitless. There are many, many books about gratitude on today’s market. Most would be found on either the “Self Help” or the “New Age” shelf at bookstores.2 There are devotional books and popular treatments of the theme from biblical or theological viewpoints. Yet there are very few intellectually or academically weighty treatments of the subject. The inattention to gratitude did not make much sense. Gifts, one would have thought, are given only when there are recipients to receive them. How, I wondered, could scholars devote such obsessive attention to the gift, and presumably to givers, and so little to receivers? Where are the philosophical, theological, political, or anthropological works on gratitude? I also found it odd that our intellectuals give so little attention to gratitude at a theoretical level in a culture that clearly puts a premium on gratitude . “Thank you” is one of the first disciplines we teach our children, and English speakers especially say “Thank you” incessantly, whether they feel the smallest twinge of gratitude or not.3 To listen to our political rhetoric , you would think gratitude was still a critical public virtue. We express gratitude to the troops in Afghanistan and to those who fought in wars before our lifetime, gratitude for the abundance we enjoy, gratitude for our freedoms. But that sort of popular political expression does not seem to be part of political theory. Gratitude is de rigueur for academics themselves: No academic book is complete without acknowledgments that fairly drip with gratitude (not, of course, to say flattery or obsequiousness). But the academics who express gratitude do not seem much interested in analyzing it. It was not always so. I had read just enough to learn that for centuries gratitude had been an important theme in philosophy, ethics, and even political theory, not to mention drama and poetry. It no longer enjoyed such stature. When had gratitude fallen out of the great conversation? And why? Here if anywhere there is a chasm between the intellectuals and the rest. As I searched, I realized that the landscape was not as bleak as I had initially thought. Early on, I stumbled across the “positive psychology” movement, whose branch of “gratitude studies” is well represented by Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough’s groundbreaking The Psychology of Gratitude. The incomparable Margaret Visser came out with The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude in 2009, and prior to that was Terrance McConnell’s Gratitude, along with a spate of articles on gratitude...

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