Dialogue With God

From The New York Review of Books-

In 2012, Sarah Ruden brought us, in a crackling translation, the second-century-AD Latin novel known as The Golden Ass of Apuleius. The Golden Ass is full of impudent incongruities. A topsy-turvy tale about a hapless young man turned into a donkey is combined with a love story (of Cupid and Psyche) as bright and delightful as the tapestries that would illustrate it throughout the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Utterly unexpectedly, the book ends with the vision of a goddess rising from the swell of a moonlit sea.

Ruden now leads us to a yet more incongruous masterpiece. A little over two centuries after The Golden Ass, we discover a person who appears to be a highly Latinate North African such as Apuleius had been—a product, indeed, of a school established in Apuleius’s own hometown, Madauros (modern M’Daourouch, in Algeria, near the tense border with Tunisia)—only to learn that he was a middle-aged Christian bishop, with his back turned to us, speaking endlessly, urgently to his God.

More here-

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/26/sarah-ruden-augustine-dialogue-god/

On Augustine by Rowan Williams, Augustine by Robin Lane Fox review – the theologian, with and without sex

From The Guardian-

These two new books on Augustine of Hippo, the towering figure of late-antique Latin theology, could not be more different, but that will hardly come as a surprise. Robin Lane Fox is an ancient historian who once wrote a book (The Unauthorised Version, 1991) announcing his own atheism and his intention to expose the historical contradictions underlying the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Rowan Williams retired as archbishop of Canterbury in 2012 – while in the role he repeatedly defended the rights of the religious to resist secularism. Lane Fox writes with a historian’s gift for exposing the strangeness of a different culture; Williams immerses himself in the theological subtleties of one of antiquity’s most ambitious thinkers.

Williams’s book, a collection of revised articles (and one sermon) written for different audiences, has all the trappings of academia: sophisticated, challenging prose, German titles in the footnotes, sometimes even untranslated Latin (not all of it, I am bound to say as a classicist, reproduced perfectly). But for all that, it is less a critical study than an attempt to enlist the ancient writer as an ally for the modern theologian. For Williams, Augustine matters as the thinker who elevated doubt, questioning and self-consciousness – gathered up in the idea of “confessions”, which became the title of his most famous work – to a spiritual state. The underlying message is that if we, in our secular world, feel paralysed by the moral complexity around us, that should lead us not to postmodern relativism and ennui, but to acknowledging that our own limitations and weaknesses are what make us human, and – more importantly – that true knowledge and wisdom are dependent on our philosophical acceptance of God within the community of Christian believers.

More here-

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/19/augustine-rowan-williams-robert-lane-fox-review

15 Augustine Quotes That Helped Shape Modern Christian Thought

 From Relevant-


Even though he though died on August 28, 430, the writings of Augustine of Hippo remain as theologically relevant and spiritually insightful as they did 1600 years ago.

The man who became a beloved-Bishop and would eventually be remembered as Saint Augustine, had such a dramatic conversion to Christianity at the age of 33, that he explored the philosophy of Scripture with a passion that led him to write hundreds of sermons and some of Christianity’s most influential books.

Here’s a look at 15 Augustine quotes that have helped shape modern Christian thought.


Read more at

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/15-augustine-quotes-helped-shape-modern-christian-thought#laKKVhJc5KfWJyw3.99