The author discusses Augustine's views on women, particularly women within Christian theology. The author also addresses how Augustine's views were based on his cultural and psychological circumstances, and how his ideas on and attitudes towards women changed.

The relationship between Augustine of Hippo and the subject of gender raises important questions. Augustine and Gender address these issues head-on. This volume offers original interpretations of the many ways that gender appears throughout Augustine’s thought and works. Contributions draw from a wide range of sources including Augustine’s sermons, letters, treatises, and dialogues. Readers will discover detailed analyses about the nature of desire and emotion, the politics of sex and marriage, the possibilities of human speech and exegesis, and the hope of education and community. In addition, this book is a persuasive demonstration of the benefits of bringing together Augustinian scholars with the most pressing concerns of the present.

In Reason, Authority, and the Healing of Desire in the Writings of Augustine, Mark Boone explains the theology of desire developed in a cross-section of Augustine’s On the True Religion, On the Nature of Good, On Free Choice of the Will, On the Teacher, On the Usefulness of Believing, On the Good of Marriage, Enchiridion, and Confessions. Throughout his writings and in many ways, Augustine develops a Platonically informed, yet distinctively Christian, account of desire. Human desire should respond to the goodness inherent in things, loving the greatest good above all and great goods more than lesser goods. Above all, we should love God and souls. Sin, an inappropriate desire for lesser goods, is healed by the redemption of Christ.

According to Augustine's doctrine of original sin, Adam's progeny share a collective guilt which, like an infection, spreads through wayward sexual desires, passing from parent to child. But is it fair to blame sinners if they inherit evil like a disease? In Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ Jesse Couenhoven clarifies the logic and illogic of Augustine's controversial views about human agency. The first half of the book examines why Augustine believed we are trapped by evil, and why only Christ can save us. Couenhoven examines overlooked texts Augustine wrote at the culmination of his career and offers a novel reading of his views about whether we control our personal identities, what we should be held culpable for, and whether freedom is compatible with necessity. The second half of the book develops a philosophically and scientifically astute theory of responsibility that makes it possible to retrieve some of Augustine's most divisive claims. Couenhoven makes a case for the surprising thesis that a carefully formulated doctrine of original sin is profoundly humane. The claim that sin is original takes seriously our dependence on one another for essential aspects of character and personality, our ownership of cognitive and volitional states that are not simply products of voluntary choices, and our status as personal agents of evil. Attending to these aspects of our lives challenges the idea that each individual's moral and spiritual standing is up to her or him, and drives us to ponder not only the nature of our responsibility and the shape of the freedom we seek, but also the need for grace we all share.

“So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” — (Genesis 1:27)

For centuries, the creation story in Genesis 1 has been a foundation for Christian understandings of the human being. In particular, this egalitarian vision of women as well as men being created in the image of God has been a lynchpin to feminist claims for equality in the church and society. But as Michele Gonzalez shows, feminist theology has struggled against a long, contrary tradition, in which women’s claim to represent the image of God was seen as deficient or secondary to men. In tracing the history of this contested theme, Gonzalez presents an introduction to the field of feminist anthropology. Ultimately, she argues, a new understanding of imago Dei in women must be rooted in a new understanding of God –grounded in, yet critical of, the Christian tradition.