St. Augustine

They put us in touch with essential things that we know to be dear or wrong.

Jamie Smith thinks it might be the other way around.

How to capture the urgency of Confessions? New translations by Sarah Ruden and Peter Constantine offer very different approaches.

Greek and English do not work the same way. So what does it mean to create a literal translation?

What does it look like to embody the peace of the city of God?

Anesthesiologist Ronald W. Dworkin reminds me that going to the doctor isn’t the same as sharing a cocktail with a friend.

I’ve never read Augustine’s City of God cover to cover. So I joined a Twitter experiment to help me get through it.

The physical reality of her son, the very tangible way that he is a part of her, will not go away. He is with her everywhere she goes.

Confessions is not primarily about Augustine at all; it is about God’s activity in the particularity of Augustine’s life.

Christians fail to realize that the responsibility for rebellion against the faith lies invariably at their own door.

"Narcissists can be inspiring. Whether they are creative or destructive depends on their philosophy."

Theology and advertising share the same root.

A memoir becomes explicitly Christian when it derives its literary power from the power of the gospel. It doesn't preach, it shows.

As I watched Inside Out, I found myself thinking about Augustine's assertion that we are what we love and what we hate.

In this anecdotal study of public apology, Edwin Battistella shows that our anxieties and confusions about confession are rooted in a deeper ambiguity: the tension between the culpable self and the apologetic self.

In Ian Leslie’s telling, curiosity is far from a valued quality. Augustine, he notes, equated curiosity with temptation.

“Truth is in constant transit. The difference between a liberal and a conservative, I think, is the stomach you have for the journey.”

It is a subtle shift that we make in our liturgy and preaching. But it’s an important one. We do terrible things and we must confess our action. But we are good. We are made in the image of God. And in Jesus Christ, we are forgiven people.

A funny thing happened on the way to the church-as-polis: I can now imagine being a resident alien and invested in the state, in all of its glorious failing.

Ritual actions can linger, even as belief fades in and out.