A Man Fully Alive: Augustine’s Conversion and Eric Voegelin’s Metaxy
Saint Augustine of Hippo lived a life in tension. Tossed about by the caprices of circumstance, wracked with intellectual doubt and inward temptation, his soul was in…
A Political Philosophy of Conservatism
A Political Philosophy of Conservatism: Prudence, Moderation and Tradition. Ferenc Hörcher. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. A Political Philosophy of Conservatism focuses on the fourth cardinal…
The Odyssey of Saint Augustine
In 430 A.D., with the Vandals laying siege to the city of Hippo, Augustine of Hippo died with Count Boniface by his side. The Roman general was…
Preface to an Augustinian History of the United States (Introduced by a Reading of Dante)
In the first Canto of his Inferno, having projected himself into a dream of his own making, Dante is confronted with a she-wolf (lupa), ultimate incarnation of…
Jonathan Edwards and the Re-Enchantment of the Saeculum: The Puritan and Edwardsian Roots of the Idea of Social Progress
Jonathan Edwards has been called “the American Augustine.”[1] From the threads of introspective piety to the Edwardsian conception of aesthetics, there are strong influences and inheritances from…
The Fall of Soul from Plotinus to Augustine
Plotinus was the last great Hellenic philosopher active during the rise of Christianity just as Christianity was just beginning to supersede the pagan Hellenic world. It remains…
Rape, Shame, and Guilt in Augustine’s City of God
Guilt and Shame It is, to this author's knowledge, a unique occurrence within the ancient world for a writer of stature to dedicate any significant volume of…
Augustine’s Confessions and Voegelin’s Philosophy
Though Eric Voegelin took his epigraph for Order and History from Augustine, he wrote little about the saint and published nothing about the Confessions.1 He linked his philosophy of history to…
Tempora et Mores
Augustine and the Problem of Power: The Essays and lectures of Charles Norris Cochrane. David Beer, ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017. If the modern barbarians…
On the Place of Augustine in Political Philosophy: A Second Look at Some Augustinian Literature
“Shall it (the happy life) be that of the philosophers, who put forward as the chief good, the good which is in ourselves? Is this the true…
Augustine and the Problem of Power: The Augustinian Prognostic
The problem of power is one of perennial interest and importance in human life, but at no period in history has it presented itself with greater urgency…
Augustine: A Saint for Eternity
When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, the city that had taken the world captive had fallen into captivity. The event was a transformative moment in Western…
Augustine on Love, Justice, and Pluralism in Human Nature
Justice is an integral theme in Augustine’s political theology, and justice is directly correlated and contingent upon his theology of love. True justice, for Augustine, begins with…
Augustine: Memory as Sacrament
For Christians, rituals of sacrament are visible and affective signs of the presence of God. Augustine defines a sacrament as an outward sign of an inward grace.…
Reading Augustine’s Confessions in Dalian Labor Camp with Liu Xiaobo
Liu Xiaobo was the Chinese dissident writer and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient who passed away this past June. He died of liver cancer while serving out…