On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self

On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self
Author: Ian Clausen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2017-11-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1501314203

The Reading Augustine series presents concise, personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religious scholars. Ian Clausen's On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self describes Augustine's central ideas on morality and how he arrived at them. Describing an intellectual journey that will resonate especially with readers at the beginning of their own journey, Clausen shows that Augustine's early writing career was an outworking of his own inner turmoil and discovery, and that both were to summit, triumphantly, on his monumental book Confessions (AD 386-401). On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self offers a way of looking at Augustine's early writing career as an on-going, developing process: a process whose chief result was to shape a conception of the moral self that has lasted and prospered to the present day.

On The Confessions as 'confessio'

On The Confessions as 'confessio'
Author: Barry A. David
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2022-06-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1350203262

This is a new guide to reading the Confessions, Augustine's most important work, and what is widely known as the first Western Christian autobiography ever written. The Confessions consists of thirteen books, in which Augustine outlines his sinful youth and his conversion to Christianity. Barry David guides the reader swiftly through these complex texts, explaining the historical context, as well as the various philosophical concepts; and considers its spiritual, ecclesial and theological significance. As with other titles in the Reading Augustine series, this book presents concise introductory reading of Augustine's work from one of the leading scholars in the field.

On King Lear, The Confessions, and Human Experience and Nature

On King Lear, The Confessions, and Human Experience and Nature
Author: Kim Paffenroth
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2021-05-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1350203211

Augustine's Confessions and Shakespeare's King Lear are two of the most influential and enduring works of the Western canon or world literature. But what does Stratford-upon-Avon have to do with Hippo, or the ascetical heretic-fighting polemicist with the author of some of the world's most beautiful love poetry? To answer these questions, Kim Paffenroth analyses the similarities and differences between the thinking of these two figures on the themes of love, language, nature and reason. Pairing and connecting the insights of Shakespeare's most nihilist tragedy with those of Augustine's most personal and sometimes self-condemnatory, sometimes triumphal work, challenges us to see their worldviews as more similar than they first seem, and as more relevant to our own fragmented and disillusioned world.

On Ethics, Politics and Psychology in the Twenty-First Century

On Ethics, Politics and Psychology in the Twenty-First Century
Author: John M. Rist
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2017-11-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1501307487

The Reading Augustine series presents concise, personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religious scholars. John Rist takes the reader through Augustine's ethics, the arguments he made and how he arrived at them, and shows how this moral philosophy remains vital for us today. Rist identifies Augustine's challenge to all ideas of moral autonomy, concentrating especially on his understanding of humility as an honest appraisal of our moral state. He looks at thinkers who accept parts of Augustine's evaluation of the human condition but lapse into bleakness and pessimism since for them God has disappeared. In the concluding parts of the book, Rist suggests how a developed version of Augustine's original vision can be applied to the complexities of modern life while also laying out, on the other hand, what our moral universe would look like without Augustine's contribution to it.

On Creativity, Liberty, Love and the Beauty of the Law

On Creativity, Liberty, Love and the Beauty of the Law
Author: Todd Breyfogle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2017-11-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1501314033

Reading Augustine presents concise, personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religious scholars. Todd Breyfogle's On Creativity, Liberty, Love and the Beauty of the Law introduces readers to Augustine's understanding of law as an arena in which the possibilities of creative freedom are reconciled with the needs of natural and civil order. It places Augustine's conception of law in the broader mosaic of his ideas about how human beings are bound together individually, socially, and spiritually. Seasoned readers of Augustine will see this fundamental element of his thought in a different light, even as those less familiar with Augustine are introduced to the thrill of following how he makes sense of the complexities of nature, history, and the human spirit.

On Solitude, Conscience, Love and Our Inner and Outer Lives

On Solitude, Conscience, Love and Our Inner and Outer Lives
Author: Ron Haflidson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2019-07-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0567682722

Ron Haflidson places the theology of Augustine in conversation with contemporary authors, who warn of the dangers of abandoning solitude for constant (often technological) connection. Haflidson addresses an essential question that has previously been neglected: What difference does it make to the practice of solitude if one believes that even in the absence of any human company, God is always intimately present? For Augustine, solitude is a moral necessity: he recommends that we regularly retreat from the crowd into the depths of our conscience, where we can dwell alone in the company of God, and enter into dialogue before and with God about who we are and how we love. Throughout this book, Haflidson pairs close readings of Augustine with those of noted cartographers of our inner lives, literary greats including Jane Austen, George Eliot, Marilynne Robinson and George Saunders. This book explores what undiscovered possibilities may lie in solitude.

On Images, Visual Culture, Memory and the Play without a Script

On Images, Visual Culture, Memory and the Play without a Script
Author: Matthias Smalbrugge
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 150135888X

Matthias Smalbrugge compares modern images to plays without a script: while they appear to refer to a deeper identity or reality, it is ultimately the image itself that truly matters. He argues that our modern society of images is the product of a destructive tendency in the Christian notion of the image in general, and Augustine of Hippo's in particular. This insight enables him to decode our current 'scripts' of image. As we live in an increasingly visual culture, we are constantly confronted with images that seem to exist without a deeper identity or reality – but did this referential character really get lost over time? Smalbrugge first explores the roots of the modern image by analysing imagery, what it represents, and its moral state within the framework of Platonic philosophy. He then moves to the Augustinian heritage, in particular the Soliloquies, the Confessions and the Trinity, where he finds valuable insights into images and memory. He explores within the trinitarian framework the crossroads of a theology of grace and a theology based on Neoplatonic views. Smalbrugge ultimately answers two questions: what happened to the referential character of the image, and can it be recovered?

On Christology, Anthropology, Cognitive Science and the Human Body

On Christology, Anthropology, Cognitive Science and the Human Body
Author: Martin Claes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2022-03-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350296112

This book reads texts of Augustine on the topic of the human body in the context of contemporary debates in philosophical theology and relevant authors from the cognitive science of religion. Martin Claes focuses particularly on Augustine's special position in the intellectual discourses of Western philosophy (free will, theodicy), theology (grace, incarnation) and humanities (anthropology, political sciences, law), arguing that his written work is an excellent point of departure for a multidimensional scholarly approach. The reading in this book shows that a different picture emerges if we make the effort to situate Augustine's mature anthropology within contemporary debates in philosophical theology and cognitive science of religion. Omnipotence, vulnerability, suffering but also purification and perfection are discussed in dialogue between patristic and philosophical theology; the human offers the clue to concepts of unity in diversity in Christ.

On Hellenism, Judaism, Individualism, and Early Christian Theories of the Subject

On Hellenism, Judaism, Individualism, and Early Christian Theories of the Subject
Author: Guillermo M. Jodra
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2022-11-17
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350303429

This first of a two-volume work provides a new understanding of Western subjectivity as theorized in the Augustinian Rule. A theopolitical synthesis of Antiquity, the Rule is a humble, yet extremely influential example of subjectivity production. In these volumes, Jodra argues that the Classical and Late-Ancient communitarian practices along the Mediterranean provide historical proof of a worldview in which the self and the other are not disjunctive components, but mutually inclusive forces. The Augustinian Rule is a culmination of this process and also the beginning of something new: the paradigm of the monastic self as protagonist of the new, medieval worldview. In this volume, Jodra takes one of the most influential and pervasive commons experiments-Augustine's Rule-and gives us its Mediterranean backstory, with an eye to solving at last the riddle of socialism. In volume two, he will present his solution in full, as a kind of Augustinian communitarianism for today. These volumes therefore restore the unity of the Hellenistic and Judaic world as found by the first Christians, proving that the self and the other are two essential pieces in the construction of our world.