The Problem of Free Choice


Book Description

One of Augustine's most important works, written between 388 and 395, this dialogue has as its objective not so much to discuss free will for its own sake as to discuss the problem of evil in reference to the existence of God, who is almighty and all-good.




Augustine and the Environment


Book Description

This volume brings into dialogue the ancient wisdom of Augustine of Hippo, a bishop of the early Christian Church of the fourth and fifth centuries, with contemporary theologians and ethicists on the topic of the environment and humanity’s place in and responsibility to it. The contributors vary widely in their estimation of how sustained and useful such a dialogue might be, from outright dismissal of the church father to extended speculation with him and in his spirit. Their conclusions impact our views of God and both human and non-human creation. Such engagement should influence any future discussion of how Christianity and environmentalism can interact or influence one another.




The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love


Book Description

This work was written by St. Augustine late in his life with the intention of supplying a well-educated Roman layman with a brief but comprehensive exposition of the essential teachings of Christianity. It contains many of his most profound and mature definitions of his thoughts on sin, grace, and predestination, and is regarded as an indispensable guide to Augustinian Christianity.




On the Road with Saint Augustine


Book Description

★ Publishers Weekly starred review One of the Top 100 Books and One of the 5 Best Books in Religion for 2019, Publishers Weekly Christianity Today 2020 Book Award Winner (Spiritual Formation) Outreach 2020 Resource of the Year (Spiritual Growth) Foreword INDIES 2019 Honorable Mention for Religion This is not a book about Saint Augustine. In a way, it's a book Augustine has written about each of us. Popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith has spent time on the road with Augustine, and he invites us to take this journey too, for this ancient African thinker knows far more about us than we might expect. Following Smith's successful You Are What You Love, this book shows how Augustine can be a pilgrim guide to a spirituality that meets the complicated world we live in. Augustine, says Smith, is the patron saint of restless hearts--a guide who has been there, asked our questions, and knows our frustrations and failed pursuits. Augustine spent a lifetime searching for his heart's true home and he can help us find our way. "What makes Augustine a guide worth considering," says Smith, "is that he knows where home is, where rest can be found, what peace feels like, even if it is sometimes ephemeral and elusive along the way." Addressing believers and skeptics alike, this book shows how Augustine's timeless wisdom speaks to the worries and struggles of contemporary life, covering topics such as ambition, sex, friendship, freedom, parenthood, and death. As Smith vividly and colorfully brings Augustine to life for 21st-century readers, he also offers a fresh articulation of Christianity that speaks to our deepest hungers, fears, and hopes.




On the Trinity


Book Description

The following dissertation concerning the Trinity, as the reader ought to be informed, has been written in order to guard against the sophistries of those who disdain to begin with faith, and are deceived by a crude and perverse love of reason. Now one class of such men endeavor to transfer to things incorporeal and spiritual the ideas they have formed, whether through experience of the bodily senses, or by natural human wit and diligent quickness, or by the aid of art, from things corporeal; so as to seek to measure and conceive of the former by the latter. Aeterna Press




Augustine's Confessions


Book Description

Eight new essays examine key philosophical issues raised by Augustine in his 'Confessions' - a masterpiece of world literature. They explore a range of topics including what constitutes the happy or blessed life, the role of philosophical perplexity in the search for truth, and the problems that arise in the attempt to understand minds.




Augustine's Problem


Book Description

Augustine's Problem provides a new approach to St. Augustine's life and doctrine, hypothesizing that his problem was not sexual addiction but sexual impotence. For Augustine, the problem with sex was not the seductive nature of women, but the unpredictability of desire, which can induce an unwanted erection or fail to provide one when even the mind would choose to have sex. He extends his personal incapacity to a general impotence of the will--we can never, without grace, choose any good. Just as the impotent man cannot work on his impotence, we cannot work on our salvation; only God can make a difference and predestines a tiny elect. The disobedience of the Garden is transferred to the disobedience of the male member, guaranteeing that the sin of Eden is transferred, in conception, as original sin. The most controversial elements of Augustine's theology are all linked to the theme of impotence, as expressed in his writings, from the Confessions to the anti-Pelagian works written at the end of his life.







Augustine and the Problem of Power


Book Description

More than seventy years after his untimely death, this collection of essays and lectures provides the first appearance of Charles Norris Cochrane’s follow-up to his seminal work, Christianity and Classical Culture. Augustine and the Problem of Power provides an accessible entrance into the vast sweep of Cochrane’s thought through his topical essays and lectures on Augustine, Roman history and literature, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Edward Gibbon. These shorter writings demonstrate the impressive breadth of Cochrane’s mastery of Greek, Roman, and early Christian thought. Here he develops the political implications of Christianity’s new concepts of sin and grace that transformed late antiquity, set the stage for the medieval world that followed, and faced the reactions of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Cochrane analyzes the revival of classical thought that animated Machiavelli’s politics as well as Gibbon’s historiography. Written amid the chaos and confusion of depression and world war in the twentieth century, Cochrane’s writings addressed the roots of problems of his own “distracted age” and are just as relevant today for the distractions of our own age.




Augustine on Evil


Book Description

This well-written and highly-acclaimed study on Augustine and the problem of evil.