★ 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.

We admire these men for their greatness, but the truth is Augustine grappled with sexual passions. Martin Luther struggled to control his tongue. John Calvin fought the battle of faith with worldly weapons. Yet each man will always be remembered for the messages he declared-messages that still resound today. John Piper explores each of these men's lives, integrating Augustine's delight in God with Luther's emphasis on the Word and Calvin's exposition of Scripture. Through their strengths and struggles we can learn how to live better today. When we consider their lives, we behold the glory and majesty of God and find power to overcome our weaknesses. If ever you are complacent about sin, if ever you lose the joy of Jesus Christ, if ever you are dulled by the world's influence, let the lives of these men help you recapture the wonder of God. Part of the The Swans Are Not Silent series.

Where does one turn to discover what Augustin wrote concerning theological topics such as Scripture, God, Christ, man, salvation? How can one find out what Augustine said about the relation between faith and reason, about evil, about ethics? Identifying the key passages in Augustine's works on any one topic can be exhausting and even impossible for the student. In this volume he will find these passages quoted, alowing him to become acquainted with one of Christendom's greatest theologians through his own words and in a volume of manageable length.

This collection examines the topic of time in the life and works of Augustine of Hippo. Adopting a global perspective on time as a philosophical and theological problem, the volume includes reflections on the meaning of history, the mortality of human bodies, and the relationship between temporal experience and linguistic expression. As Augustine himself once observed, time is both familiar and surprisingly strange. Everyone’s days are structured by temporal rhythms and routines, from watching the clock to whiling away the hours at work. Few of us, however, take the time to sit down and figure out whether time is real or not, or how it is we are able to hold our past, present, and future thoughts together in a straight line so that we can recite a prayer or sing a song. Divided into five sections, the essays collected here highlight the ongoing relevance of Augustine’s work even in settings quite distinct from his own era and context. The first three sections, organized around the themes of interpretation, language, and gendered embodiment, engage directly with Augustine’s own writings, from the Confessions to the City of God and beyond. The final two sections, meanwhile, explore the afterlife of the Augustinian approach in conversation with medieval Islamic and Christian thinkers (like Avicenna and Aquinas), as well as a broad range of Buddhist figures (like Dharmakīrti and Vasubandhu). What binds all of these diverse chapters together is the underlying sense that, regardless of the century or the tradition in which we find ourselves, there is something about the puzzle of temporality that refuses to go away. Time, as Augustine knew, demands our attention. This was true for him in late ancient North Africa. It was also true for Buddhist thinkers in South and East Asia. And it remains just as true for humankind in the twenty-first century, as people around the globe continue to grapple with the reality of time and the challenges of living in a world that always seems to be to be speeding up rather than slowing down.

A thorough and conscientious commentary on the first three chapters from the Book of Genesis, completed in 415. Augustine's purpose is to explain, to the best of his ability, what the author intended to say about what God did when he made heaven and earth. Contains Books 1-6. +

The essays here make the findings of scholars of philosophy and theology accessible and useful to upper-level undergraduate or graduate-level courses in religious studies or the history and philosophy of science. It also presents a useful collection of classic essays and new essays appearing here for the first time.

This volume is accurately annotated, including * an extensive biography of the author and his life * working interactive footnotes The four books of St. Augustin On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana, iv libri) are a compend of exegetical theology to guide the reader in the understanding and interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures, according to the analogy of faith. The first three books were written ad 397; the fourth was added 426. It is the first and best patristic work on biblical Hermeneutics, and continued for a thousand years, together with the Prefaces of Jerome, to be the chief exegetical guide. Although it is superseded as a scientific work by modern Hermeneutics and Critical Introductions to the Old and New Testaments, it is not surpassed for originality, depth and spiritual insight.