The Augustine Way

What can we learn from Augustine about apologetics? This book shows how Augustine defended the faith in late antiquity and how his approach to engaging the culture has great significance for the apologetic task today. Joshua Chatraw and Mark Allen, coauthors of the award-winning Apologetics at the Cross (an Outreach magazine and Gospel Coalition Resource of the Year), recover Augustine's mature apologetic voice to address the challenges facing today's church. The Augustine Way offers a compelling argument for Christian witness that is rooted in tradition and engaged with contemporary culture. It focuses on Augustine's best-known works, Confessions and The City of God, to retrieve his scriptural and ecclesial approach for a holistic apologetic witness. This book will be useful for students as well as for pastors, church leaders, and practitioners of Christian apologetics. It puts pastors and churches back at the center of apologetics, transcending popular contemporary methods with a view to a more effective witness in post-Christendom.

Augustine's dialogue De libero arbitrio (On Free Choice) is, with his Confessions and City of God, one of his most important and widely read works. It contains one of the earliest accounts of the concept of 'free will' in the history of philosophy. Composed during a key period in Augustine's early career, between his conversion to Christianity and his ordination as a bishop, it has often been viewed as a an incoherent mixture of his 'early' and 'late'thinking. Simon Harrison offers an original account of Augustine's theory of will, taking seriously both the philosophical arguments and literary form of the text. Relating De libero arbitrio to other key texts of Augustine's, in particular the City of God and the Confessions, Harrison shows that Augustine approaches the problemof free will as a problem of knowledge: how do I know that I am free?, and that Augustine uses the dialogue form to instantiate his 'way into the will'.

★ 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.

Augustine's dialogue De libero arbitrio (On Free Choice) is, with his Confessions and City of God, one of his most important and widely read works. It contains one of the earliest accounts of the concept of 'free will' in the history of philosophy. Composed during a key period in Augustine's early career, between his conversion to Christianity and his ordination as a bishop, it has often been viewed as a an incoherent mixture of his 'early' and 'late' thinking. Simon Harrison offers an original account of Augustine's theory of will, taking seriously both the philosophical arguments and literary form of the text. Relating De libero arbitrio to other key texts of Augustine's, in particular the City of God and the Confessions, Harrison shows that Augustine approaches the problem of free will as a problem of knowledge: how do I know that I am free?, and that Augustine uses the dialogue form to instantiate his 'way into the will'.

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Garry Wills, the story of Augustine’s Confessions In this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions--what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read, and the many ways it has been misread in the one-and-a-half millennia since it was composed. Following Wills's biography of Augustine and his translation of the Confessions, this is an unparalleled introduction to one of the most important books in the Christian and Western traditions. Understandably fascinated by the story of Augustine's life, modern readers have largely succumbed to the temptation to read the Confessions as autobiography. But, Wills argues, this is a mistake. The book is not autobiography but rather a long prayer, suffused with the language of Scripture and addressed to God, not man. Augustine tells the story of his life not for its own significance but in order to discern how, as a drama of sin and salvation leading to God, it fits into sacred history. "We have to read Augustine as we do Dante," Wills writes, "alert to rich layer upon layer of Scriptural and theological symbolism." Wills also addresses the long afterlife of the book, from controversy in its own time and relative neglect during the Middle Ages to a renewed prominence beginning in the fourteenth century and persisting to today, when the Confessions has become an object of interest not just for Christians but also historians, philosophers, psychiatrists, and literary critics. With unmatched clarity and skill, Wills strips away the centuries of misunderstanding that have accumulated around Augustine's spiritual classic.

Most theology students realize Augustine is tremendously influential on the Christian tradition as a whole, but they generally lack real knowledge of his writings. This volume introduces Augustine's theology through seven of his most important works. Matthew Levering begins with a discussion of Augustine's life and times and then provides a full survey of the argument of each work with bibliographical references for those who wish to go further. Written in clear, accessible language, this book offers an essential introduction to major works of Augustine that all students of theology--and their professors!--need to know.