The first book to explicate and analyse Augustine's seminal argument concerning humility and pride, especially in politics and philosophy, in The City of God. Keys shows how contemporary readers have much to gain from engaging Augustine's lengthy argument on behalf of virtuous humility.

This book is the first to interpret and reflect on Augustine's seminal argument concerning humility and pride, especially in politics and philosophy, in The City of God. Mary Keys shows how contemporary readers have much to gain from engaging Augustine's lengthy argument on behalf of virtuous humility. She also demonstrates how a deeper understanding of the classical and Christian philosophical-rhetorical modes of discourse in The City of God enables readers to appreciate and evaluate Augustine's nuanced case for humility in politics, philosophy, and religion. Comprised of a series of interpretive essays and commentaries following Augustine's own order of segments and themes in The City of God, Keys' volume unpacks the author's complex text and elucidates its challenge, meaning, and importance for contemporary readers. It also illuminates a central, yet easily underestimated theme with perennial relevance in a classic work of political thought and religion.

A new reading of Augustine's City of God which considers the status of politics within Augustine's sacramental worldview.

Masterfully explains Augustine's major work The City of God book by book through engagement with theology, history and political science.

This volume addresses our global crisis by turning to Augustine, a master at integrating disciplines, philosophies, and human experiences in times of upheaval. It covers themes of selfhood, church and state, education, liberalism, realism, and 20th-century thinkers. The contributors enhance our understanding of Augustine’s thought by heightening awareness of his relevance to diverse political, ethical, and sociological questions. Bringing together Augustine and Gallicanism, civil religion, and Martin Luther King, Jr., this volume expands the boundaries of Augustine scholarship through a consideration of subjects at the heart of contemporary political theory.

Tolerance is usually regarded as a quintessential liberal value. This position is supported by a standard liberal history that views religious toleration as emerging from the post-Reformation wars of religion as the solution to the problem of religious violence. Requiring the separation of church from state, tolerance was secured by giving the state the sole authority to punish religious violence and to protect the individual freedoms of conscience and religion. Commitment to tolerance is independent of judgements about justice and the common good. This standard liberal history exerts a powerful hold on the modern imagination: it undergirds several important recent accounts of liberal tolerance and virtually every major study of tolerance in the ancient world. Nevertheless, this familiar narrative distorts our understanding of tolerance's premodern origins and impoverishes present-day debates when many members of Christianity and Islam, the two largest global religions, have reservations about liberal tolerance. Setting aside the standard liberal history, The Christian Origins of Tolerance recovers tolerance's beginnings in a forgotten tradition forged by North African Christian thinkers of the first five centuries CE in critical conversation with one another, St. Paul, the rival tradition of Stoicism, and the political and legal thought of the wider Roman world. This North African Christian tradition conceives of tolerance as patience within plurality. This tradition does not require the separation of religion and the secular state as a prerequisite for tolerance and embeds individual rights and the freedoms of conscience and religion within a wider theoretical framework that derives accounts of political judgement and patience from theological reflection on God's roles as a patient father and just judge. By recovering this forgotten tradition, we can better understand and assess the choices made by leading theorists of liberal tolerance, and as a result, think better about how to achieve peaceful coexistence within and beyond liberal democracies in a world in which many Christians and Muslims are sceptical of liberalism.

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

Secularism is usually thought to contain the project of self-deification, in which humans attack God’s authority in order to take his place, freed from all constraints. Julie E. Cooper overturns this conception through an incisive analysis of the early modern justifications for secular politics. While she agrees that secularism is a means of empowerment, she argues that we have misunderstood the sources of secular empowerment and the kinds of strength to which it aspires. Contemporary understandings of secularism, Cooper contends, have been shaped by a limited understanding of it as a shift from vulnerability to power. But the works of the foundational thinkers of secularism tell a different story. Analyzing the writings of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau at the moment of secularity’s inception, she shows that all three understood that acknowledging one’s limitations was a condition of successful self-rule. And while all three invited humans to collectively build and sustain a political world, their invitations did not amount to self-deification. Cooper establishes that secular politics as originally conceived does not require a choice between power and vulnerability. Rather, it challenges us—today as then—to reconcile them both as essential components of our humanity.

Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy, as well as a scholar of medieval philosophy. In 1946 he attained the distinction of being elected an "Immortal" (member) of the Académie française. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1959 and 1964. The appearance of Gilson's Metamorphosis of the City of God, which were originally delivered as lectures at the University of Louvain, Belgium, in the Spring of 1952, coincided with the first steps toward what would become the European Union. The appearance of this English translation coincides with the upheaval of Brexit. Gilson traces the various attempts of thinkers through the centuries to describe Europe's soul and delimit its parts. The Scots, Catalonians, Flemings, and probably others may nod in agreement in Gilson's observation on how odd would be a Europe composed of the political entities that existed two and a half centuries ago. Those who think the European Union has lost its soul may not be comforted by the difficulty thinkers have had over the centuries in defining that soul. Indeed the difficulties that have thus far prevented integrating Turkey into the EU confirm Gilson's description of the conundrum involved even in distinguishing Europe's material components. And yet, the endeavor has succeeded, so that the problem of shared ideals remain inescapable. One wonders which of the thinkers in the succession studied by Gilson might grasp assent and illuminate the EU's path.

"As the psalms are a microcosm of the Old Testament, so the Expositions of the Psalms can be seen as a microcosm of Augustinian thought. In the Book of Psalms are to be found the history of the people of Israel, the theology and spirituality of the Old Covenant, and a treasury of human experience expressed in prayer and poetry. So too does the work of expounding the psalms recapitulate and focus the experiences of Augustine's personal life, his theological reflections and his pastoral concerns as Bishop of Hippo."--Publisher's website.