Augustine and the Limits of Politics

Augustine and the Limits of Politics PDF Author: Jean Bethke Elshtain
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268161143
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
Now with a new foreword by Patrick J. Deneen. Jean Bethke Elshtain brings Augustine's thought into the contemporary political arena and presents an Augustine who created a complex moral map that offers space for loyalty, love, and care, as well as a chastened form of civic virtue. The result is a controversial book about one of the world's greatest and most complex thinkers whose thought continues to haunt all of Western political philosophy. What is our business "within this common mortal life?" Augustine asks and bids us to ask ourselves. What can Augustine possibly have to say about the conditions that characterize our contemporary society and appear to put democracy in crisis? Who is Augustine for us now and what do his words have to do with political theory? These are the underlying questions that animate Jean Bethke Elshtain's fascinating engagement with the thought and work of Augustine, the ancient thinker who gave no political theory per se and refused to offer up a positive utopia. In exploring the questions, Why Augustine, why now? Elshtain argues that Augustine's great works display a canny and scrupulous attunement to the here and now and the very real limits therein. She discusses other aspects of Augustine's thought as well, including his insistence that no human city can be modeled on the heavenly city, and further elaborates on Hannah Arendt's deep indebtedness to Augustine's understanding of evil. Elshtain also presents Augustine's arguments against the pridefulness of philosophy, thereby linking him to later currents in modern thought, including Wittgenstein and Freud.

Augustine and the Limits of Politics

Augustine and the Limits of Politics PDF Author: Jean Bethke Elshtain
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268161143
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Get Book Here

Book Description
Now with a new foreword by Patrick J. Deneen. Jean Bethke Elshtain brings Augustine's thought into the contemporary political arena and presents an Augustine who created a complex moral map that offers space for loyalty, love, and care, as well as a chastened form of civic virtue. The result is a controversial book about one of the world's greatest and most complex thinkers whose thought continues to haunt all of Western political philosophy. What is our business "within this common mortal life?" Augustine asks and bids us to ask ourselves. What can Augustine possibly have to say about the conditions that characterize our contemporary society and appear to put democracy in crisis? Who is Augustine for us now and what do his words have to do with political theory? These are the underlying questions that animate Jean Bethke Elshtain's fascinating engagement with the thought and work of Augustine, the ancient thinker who gave no political theory per se and refused to offer up a positive utopia. In exploring the questions, Why Augustine, why now? Elshtain argues that Augustine's great works display a canny and scrupulous attunement to the here and now and the very real limits therein. She discusses other aspects of Augustine's thought as well, including his insistence that no human city can be modeled on the heavenly city, and further elaborates on Hannah Arendt's deep indebtedness to Augustine's understanding of evil. Elshtain also presents Augustine's arguments against the pridefulness of philosophy, thereby linking him to later currents in modern thought, including Wittgenstein and Freud.

Augustine and the Limits of Virtue

Augustine and the Limits of Virtue PDF Author: James Wetzel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521405416
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
This sophisticated analysis of Augustine's thought on virtue and the will makes a notable contribution to Augustine studies, and casts light both on the subject of 'moral luck' and on the relationship between theology and philosophy generally.

Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine's City of God

Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine's City of God PDF Author: Veronica Eileen Roberts
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108842593
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
A new reading of Augustine's City of God which considers the status of politics within Augustine's sacramental worldview.

Politics and the Order of Love

Politics and the Order of Love PDF Author: Eric Gregory
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226307514
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
Augustine—for all of his influence on Western culture and politics—was hardly a liberal. Drawing from theology, feminist theory, and political philosophy, Eric Gregory offers here a liberal ethics of citizenship, one less susceptible to anti-liberal critics because it is informed by the Augustinian tradition. The result is a book that expands Augustinian imaginations for liberalism and liberal imaginations for Augustinianism. Gregory examines a broad range of Augustine’s texts and their reception in different disciplines and identifies two classical themes which have analogues in secular political theory: love—and related notions of care, solidarity, and sympathy—and sin—as well as related notions of cruelty, evil, and narrow self-interest. From an Augustinian point of view, Gregory argues, love and sin constrain each other in ways that yield a distinctive vision of the limits and possibilities of politics. In providing a constructive argument for Christian participation in liberal democratic societies, Gregory advances efforts to revive a political theology in which love’s relation to justice is prominent. Politics and the Order of Love will provoke new conversations for those interested in Christian ethics, moral psychology, and the role of religion in a liberal society.

Augustine's Political Thought

Augustine's Political Thought PDF Author: Richard J. Dougherty
Publisher:
ISBN: 1580469248
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This important collection reveals that Augustine's political thought drew on and diverged from the classical tradition, contributing to the study of questions at the center of all Western political thought.

Augustine in a Time of Crisis

Augustine in a Time of Crisis PDF Author: Boleslaw Z. Kabala
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030614859
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
This volume addresses our global crisis by turning to Augustine, a master at integrating disciplines, philosophies, and human experiences in times of upheaval. It covers themes of selfhood, church and state, education, liberalism, realism, and 20th-century thinkers. The contributors enhance our understanding of Augustine’s thought by heightening awareness of his relevance to diverse political, ethical, and sociological questions. Bringing together Augustine and Gallicanism, civil religion, and Martin Luther King, Jr., this volume expands the boundaries of Augustine scholarship through a consideration of subjects at the heart of contemporary political theory.

Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine

Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine PDF Author: Robert Dodaro
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139456512
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine is a study of Augustine's political thought and ethics in relation to his theology. The book examines fundamental issues in Augustine's theological and political ethics in relation to the question, 'How did Augustine conceive the just society'? At the heart of the book's approach is the relationship that Augustine outlines in his City of God and other writings between Christ and those believers who acknowledge him to be the only source of the soul's virtue. The book demonstrates how Augustine sees Christ's grace and the scriptures contributing to the soul's growth in virtue, especially as these issues are framed by the Pelagian controversy. Finally, the implications which Augustine sees for Christ's mediation of virtue are examined in relation to his revision of the ancient concepts of heroism and the statesman.

Jean Bethke Elshtain

Jean Bethke Elshtain PDF Author: Debra Erickson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780268103057
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Jean Bethke Elshtain is the first attempt to evaluate Elshtain's entire published body of work and to give shape to a wide-ranging scholarly career.

Augustine and the Problem of Power

Augustine and the Problem of Power PDF Author: Charles Norris Cochrane
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498294243
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
More than seventy years after his untimely death, this collection of essays and lectures provides the first appearance of Charles Norris Cochrane’s follow-up to his seminal work, Christianity and Classical Culture. Augustine and the Problem of Power provides an accessible entrance into the vast sweep of Cochrane’s thought through his topical essays and lectures on Augustine, Roman history and literature, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Edward Gibbon. These shorter writings demonstrate the impressive breadth of Cochrane’s mastery of Greek, Roman, and early Christian thought. Here he develops the political implications of Christianity’s new concepts of sin and grace that transformed late antiquity, set the stage for the medieval world that followed, and faced the reactions of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Cochrane analyzes the revival of classical thought that animated Machiavelli’s politics as well as Gibbon’s historiography. Written amid the chaos and confusion of depression and world war in the twentieth century, Cochrane’s writings addressed the roots of problems of his own “distracted age” and are just as relevant today for the distractions of our own age.

Augustine's City of God

Augustine's City of God PDF Author: James Wetzel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521199948
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This volume addresses the complex and conflicted vision in Augustine's City of God, as a heavenly city on earthly pilgrimage.