Through examination of Augustine's account of the human relation to God, Matthew Drever finds a crucial resource for a religious reorientation and revaluation of the human person,

Engaging with the Complex Subject of Theological Anthropology. Theological anthropology is a complicated doctrinal subject that needs to be elaborated with careful attention to its relation to other major doctrines. Among other things, it must confess the glory and misery of humanity, from creation in the image of God to the fall into a state of sin. It must reckon with a holism that spans distinctions between body, soul, and spirit, and a unity that encompasses male and female, as well as racial and cultural difference. The Christian Doctrine of Humanity represents the proceedings of the sixth annual Los Angeles Theology Conference, which sought, constructively and comprehensively, to engage the task of theological anthropology. The twelve diverse essays in this collection include discussions on: Human thought and the image of God. The relevance of biblical eschatology for philosophical anthropology. Living and flourishing in the Spirit. Vocation and the "oddness" of human nature. Each of the essays collected in this volume engage with Scripture as well as with others in the field—theologians both past and present, from different confessions—in order to provide constructive resources for contemporary systematic theology and to forge a theology for the future.

In our current pluralist context, there is no clearly designated means of valuing or defining the human person. Matthew Drever shows that in the writings of St. Augustine we find a concept of the human person that is fluid, tenuous, prone to great good and great vice, and influenced deeply by the wider spiritual and material environment. Through an examination of his account of the human relation to God, Drever demonstrates how Augustine can offer a crucial resource for a religious reorientation and revaluation of the human person. Drever focuses particularly on the concepts of the imago dei and creatio ex nihilo, significant for their influence on Augustine's understanding of the human person and for their potential to bridge his and our own world. Though rooted in Augustine's early work, these concepts are developed fully in his later writings: his Genesis commentaries and On the Trinity in particular. Drever examines how in these later writings the origin (creatio ex nihilo) and identity (imago dei) of the human person intersect with Augustine's understanding of creation, Christ, and the Trinity. Image, Identity, and the Forming of the Augustinian Soul constructs an interpretation of Augustine's view of the person that acknowledges its classical context while also addressing contemporary theological and philosophical appropriations of Augustine and the issues that animate them.

Within contemporary orthodoxy, debates over sex and gender have become increasingly polemical over the past generation. Beginning with questions around women’s ordination, arguments have expanded to include feminism, sexual orientation, the sacrament of marriage, definitions of family, adoption of children, and care of transgender individuals. Preliminary responses to each of these topics are shaped by gender essentialism, the idea that male and female are ontologically fixed and incommensurate categories with different sets of characteristics and gifts for each sex. These categories, in turn, delineate gender roles in the family, the church, and society. Gender Essentialism and Orthodoxy offers an immanent critique of gender essentialism in the stream of the contemporary Orthodox Church influenced by the “Paris School” of Russian émigré theologians and their heirs. It uses an interdisciplinary approach to bring into conversation patristic reflections on sex and gender, personalist theological anthropology, insights from gender and queer theory, and modern biological understandings of human sexual differentiation. Though these are seemingly unrelated discourses, Gender Essentialism and Orthodoxy reveals unexpected points of convergence, as each line of thought eschews a strict gender binary in favor of more open-ended possibilities. The study concludes by drawing out some theological implications of the preceding findings as they relate to the ordination of women to the priesthood, same-sex unions and sacramental understandings of marriage, definitions of family, and pastoral care for intersex, transgender, and nonbinary parishioners.

Augustine of Hippo, indisputably one of the most important figures for the study of memory, is credited with establishing memory as the inner source of selfhood and locus of the search for God. Yet, those who study memory in Augustine have never before taken into account his preaching. His sermons are the sources of memory's greatest development for Augustine. In Augustine's preaching, especially on the Psalms, the interior gives way to communal exterior. Both the self and search for God are re-established in a shared Christological identity and the communal labors of remembering and forgetting. This book opens with Augustine's early works and Confessions as the beginning of memory and concludes with Augustine's Trinity and preaching on Psalm 50 as the end of memory. The heart of the book, the work of memory, sets forth how ongoing remembering and forgetting in Christ are for Augustine are foundational to the life of grace. To that end, Augustine and his congregants go leaping in memory together, keep festival with abiding traces, and become forgetful runners like St. Paul. Remembering and forgetting in Christ, the ongoing work of memory, prove for Augustine to be actions of reconciliation of the distended experiences of human life-of praising and groaning, labouring and resting, solitude and communion. Augustine on Memory presents this new communal and Christological paradigm not only for Augustinian studies, but also for theologians, philosophers, ethicists, and interdisciplinary scholars of memory.

In Augustine and Plotinus: the Human Mind as Image of the Divine Laela Zwollo provides an inside view of two of the most influential thinkers of late antiquity: the Christian Augustine and the Neo-Platonist Plotinus. By exploring the finer points and paradoxes of their doctrines of the image of God (the human soul/intellect), the illustrious church father’s complex interaction with his most important non-biblical source comes into focus. In order to fathom Augustine, we should first grasp the beauty in Plotinus’ philosophy and its attractiveness to Christians. This monograph will contribute to a better understanding of the formative years of Christianity as well as later ancient philosophy. It can serve as a handbook for becoming acquainted with the two thinkers, as well as for delving into the profundity of their thought.