This book is a tool for teaching and studying the great Christian classic, Augustine's Confessions. It is a unique venture in which thirteen different scholars look at each of the thirteen books in the Confessions and interpret their chapters in light of that book and in light of the rest of Augustine's work. The result is that the richness and ambiguity of Augustine's work shines through as well as the richness and ambiguity of different readings of the Confessions.

Presents the best scholarship on Augustine's Confessions which will facilitate a better understanding of this masterpiece.

This work provides an in-depth commentary on all thirteen books of St. Augustine's Confessions. It scrutinizes the details of this world-famous intellectual and spiritual autobiography, while addressing the key issues raised by past and current scholars.

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.

This second edition of the Companion has been thoroughly revised and updated with eleven new chapters and a new bibliography.

A Companion to Augustine presents a fresh collection of scholarship by leading academics with a new approach to contextualizing Augustine and his works within the multi-disciplinary field of Late Antiquity, showing Augustine as both a product of the cultural forces of his times and a cultural force in his own right. Discusses the life and works of Augustine within their full historical context, rather than privileging the theological context Presents Augustine’s life, works and leading ideas in the cultural context of the late Roman world, providing a vibrant and engaging sense of Augustine in action in his own time and place Opens up a new phase of study on Augustine, sensitive to the many and varied perspectives of scholarship on late Roman culture State-of-the-art essays by leading academics in this field

This reading of the "Confessions" focuses on its aim to convert its readers (it displays some characteristics of the protreptic genre) and on a specific segment of its potential audience, Augustine's erstwhile co-religionists, the Manichaeans.

A Companion to Augustine presents a fresh collection of scholarship by leading academics with a new approach to contextualizing Augustine and his works within the multi-disciplinary field of Late Antiquity, showing Augustine as both a product of the cultural forces of his times and a cultural force in his own right. Discusses the life and works of Augustine within their full historical context, rather than privileging the theological context Presents Augustine’s life, works and leading ideas in the cultural context of the late Roman world, providing a vibrant and engaging sense of Augustine in action in his own time and place Opens up a new phase of study on Augustine, sensitive to the many and varied perspectives of scholarship on late Roman culture State-of-the-art essays by leading academics in this field

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.

A meditation on the conversions, betrayals, and divine revelations of motherhood. What if Augustine's Confessions had been written not by a man, but by a mother? How might her tales of desire, temptation, and transformation differ from his? In this memoir, Natalie Carnes describes giving birth to a daughter and beginning a story of conversion strikingly unlike Augustine's—even as his journey becomes a surprising companion to her own. The challenges Carnes recounts will be familiar to many parents. She wonders what and how much she should ask her daughter to suffer in resisting racism, patriarchy, and injustice. She wrestles with an impulse to compel her child to flourish, and reflects on what this desire reveals about human freedom. She negotiates the conflicting demands of a religiously divided home, a working motherhood, and a variety of social expectations, and traces the hopes and anxieties such negotiations expose. The demands of motherhood continually open for her new modes of reflection about deep Christian commitments and age-old human questions. Addressing first her child and then her God, Carnes narrates how a child she once held within her body grows increasingly separate, provoking painful but generative change. Having given birth, she finds that she herself is reborn.