The Journey toward God in Augustine's Confessions

The Journey toward God in Augustine's Confessions PDF Author: Carl G. Vaught
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791457917
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
A new interpretation of the first six books of Augustine's Confessions, emphasizing the importance of Christianity rather than Neoplatonism.

The Journey toward God in Augustine's Confessions

The Journey toward God in Augustine's Confessions PDF Author: Carl G. Vaught
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791457917
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
A new interpretation of the first six books of Augustine's Confessions, emphasizing the importance of Christianity rather than Neoplatonism.

Encounters with God in Augustine's Confessions

Encounters with God in Augustine's Confessions PDF Author: Carl G. Vaught
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791484998
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This book continues Carl G. Vaught's thoroughgoing reinterpretation of Augustine's Confessions—one that rejects the view that Augustine is simply a Neoplatonist and argues that he is also a definitively Christian thinker. As a companion volume to the earlier Journey toward God in Augustine's Confessions: Books I–VI, it can be read in sequence with or independently of it. This work covers the middle portion of the Confessions, Books VII–IX. Opening in Augustine's youthful maturity, Books VII–IX focus on the three pivotal experiences that transform his life: the Neoplatonic vision that causes him to abandon materialism; his conversion to Christianity that leads him beyond Neoplatonism to a Christian attitude toward the world and his place in it; and the mystical experience he shares with his mother a few days before her death, which points to the importance of the Christian community. Vaught argues that time, space, and eternity intersect to provide a framework in which these three experiences occur and which give Augustine a three-fold access to God.

Access to God in Augustine's Confessions

Access to God in Augustine's Confessions PDF Author: Carl G. Vaught
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791483525
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
This is the final volume in Carl G. Vaught's groundbreaking trilogy reappraising Augustine's Confessions, a cornerstone of Western philosophy and one of the most influential works in the Christian tradition. Vaught offers a new interpretation of the philosopher as less Neoplatonic and more distinctively Christian than most interpreters have thought. In this book, he focuses on the most philosophical section of the Confessions and on how it relates to the previous, more autobiographical sections. A companion to the previous two volumes, which dealt with Books I–IX, this book can be read either in sequence with or independently of the others. Books X–XIII of the Confessions begin after Augustine has become Bishop of Hippo and they are separated by more than ten years from the episodes recorded in the previous nine books of the text. This establishes the narrative in the present and speaks to the "believing sons of men." Augustine explores how memory, time, and creation make the journey toward God and the encounter with God possible. Vaught analyzes these conditions in order to unlock Augustine's solutions to familiar philosophical and theological problems. He also tackles the frequently discussed problem of the alleged disconnection between the earlier books and the last four books by showing how Augustine binds experience and reflection together.

"You Made Us for Yourself"

Author: Jared Ortiz
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1506406874
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Augustine’s Confessions is probably the most commented upon text of early Christianity. Yet, there is a general consensus that this justly famous work is neither well composed nor structurally unified. “You Made Us for Yourself” aims to challenge this common notion by approaching the Confessions in light of what Augustine himself would have considered most fundamental: creation, understood in a broad sense. Creation, for Augustine, is an epiphany, a light that reveals who God is and who human beings are. It is not merely one doctrine or theme among others, but is the foundational context which illumines all doctrines and all themes. Moreover, creation, for Augustine, is dynamically ordered toward the church, toward the deified destiny the body of Christ both is and brings about. Thus, the Confessions itself can be understood as Augustine’s prayer of praise in thanksgiving for the unmerited gift of creation (and re-creation). It is his self-gift back to God—a kind of eucharistic offering intended to take up and bring about the same in his readers. Augustine’s rich understanding of creation, then, can account for the often despaired of meaning, structure, and unity of the Confessions.

The Quest for Wholeness

The Quest for Wholeness PDF Author: Carl G. Vaught
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438422792
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
"This book has been written for the artist, for the theologian, and for the philosopher, each of whom must be concerned with the question, "What does it mean to be human?" But at a deeper level, it is written for any reader who knows what it means to be fragmented, and who is willing to undertake a quest for wholeness in experiential and reflective terms." — from the Preface The Quest for Wholeness is a philosophic odyssey into humankind's feelings of fragmentation, and the search for unity born of those feelings. It blends the concreteness of art and religion with the discipline of philosophy to illuminate those places in experience and reflection where fragmentation is encountered and the meaning of wholeness is first discovered. Carl Vaught discusses the problems of fragmentation and unity, beginning with the aesthetic concreteness represented by the quest in Herman Melville's Moby Dick; moving through the religious dimension represented by the biblical stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses; passing on to the reflective discourse in Plato's Euthyphro; and ending in a confrontation with Hegel that unites the concrete particularity of religious and communal life with the dialectic of Socrates' normative reasoning. This book is written with the conviction that the professional philosopher should not address a merely professional audience, but the larger world as well, and that in the end he must come to terms with himself and with the most pressing questions that confront the human spirit.

Reading Augustine

Reading Augustine PDF Author: Jason Byassee
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1621897427
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 67

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Book Description
The Confessions of St. Augustine is one of the few Christian classics that is still widely read in the secular academy. Yet, oddly enough, it is not often read in the manner Augustine appears to have intended and in which the church read it for centuries: as a model of conversion, devotion, friendship, and the love of God. This book is a companion for any reader of the Confessions--whether in an academic, ecclesial, or devotional context--informed by the latest scholarship yet always directed toward pushing the reader, with Augustine, toward God.

The Journey Toward God in Augustine's Confessions

The Journey Toward God in Augustine's Confessions PDF Author: Carl G. Vaught
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791457924
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
A new interpretation of the first six books of Augustine's Confessions, emphasizing the importance of Christianity rather than Neoplatonism.

So Ancient and So New

So Ancient and So New PDF Author: Glenn Arbery
Publisher: St. Augustine's Press
ISBN: 9781587318191
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The study of any masterpiece can change one's life, but the Confessions of St. Augustine, like Plato's Republic or Dante's Commedia, has the almost uncanny power to enact in the reader what it describes. Plato's book reconfigures the city of the soul by freeing it from enslavement to the tyrannical passions and making it answerable to reason in its pursuit of the good. For Augustine, who shares many of the same ends, the pursuit of the good is not the rectification of philosophical reason, but (as it was for Dante) an intensely personal and consuming love: the encounter with the living God. Oddly, it may seem, that encounter comes for Augustine through the act of reading. Unlike Plato, who depicts the process of reasoning toward the truth, Augustine finds the truth revealed in another, immeasurably greater book that cannot be read in its true sense without the help of its author. The essays uncover a variety of themes, from Augustine's act of reading (Marc LePain and Bercier), his emphasis on memory (Roger Corriveau), and his choice to reveal to the world his "hidden and unworldly activity" (Daniel Maher), to the way Augustine's own education might serve as a corrective to contemporary understandings of "assessment" (Gavin Colvert). The vast wake of Augustine's work includes writers from Dante and Montaigne to Nabokov, but three representative figures were chosen to show his influence: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Confessions (Rick Sorenson), James Joyce in the whole range of his work (Eloise Knowlton), and T.S. Eliot in the Four Quartets (Glenn Arbery). The most direct engagement with Augustine is obviously Rousseau's. In his essay comparing and contrasting the pivotal moments of the two Confessions, Rick Sorenson explores major differences between the way of faith and the path of reliance on reason. Joyce might be said to have taken Rousseau's path (at least in rejecting revelation), whereas Eliot took Augustine's. In its sophistications and anxieties, the late antiquity Augustine inhabited feels a great deal like the late modernity we inhabit now. Certainly, the barbarians of materialist thought long ago sacked the civilization our ancestors inhabited. When Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, he already saw the old order of antiquity and Christendom as "stony rubble," "a heap of broken images." As one of his speakers puts it, "Dry bones can harm no one." This old book, the Confessions, might seem to our contemporaries as dry and dead as those bones, but it is not so. Without being a defense of Christianity (as the City of God is) or a work of catechesis, the Confessions might be the greatest counter to the materialist creed in Western literature. It recounts Augustine's central, intensely personal, and ultimately liberating struggle to conceive of spiritual substance, an intellectual achievement without which he cannot even hope to accommodate his understanding to the reality of God. This book of essays has one primary end, which is to entice the reader to reopen Augustine's book, to look over his shoulder and see what the act of reading means to him and what it has accomplished: the world-changing encounter with the substance of the Word.

Augustine

Augustine PDF Author: Robin Lane Fox
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465061575
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 885

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Book Description
"This narrative of the first half of Augustine's life conjures the intellectual and social milieu of the late Roman Empire with a Proustian relish for detail." -- New York Times In Augustine, celebrated historian Robin Lane Fox follows Augustine of Hippo on his journey to the writing of his Confessions. Unbaptized, Augustine indulged in a life of lust before finally confessing and converting. Lane Fox recounts Augustine's sexual sins, his time in an outlawed heretical sect, and his gradual return to spirituality. Magisterial and beautifully written, Augustine is the authoritative portrait of this colossal figure at his most thoughtful, vulnerable, and profound.

On the Road with Saint Augustine

On the Road with Saint Augustine PDF Author: James K. A. Smith
Publisher: Brazos Press
ISBN: 149341996X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
★ 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.