Seducing Augustine

Author : Virginia Burrus,Mark D. Jordan,Karmen MacKendrick
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
Page : 189 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2010
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780823231935

Get Book

Seducing Augustine by Virginia Burrus,Mark D. Jordan,Karmen MacKendrick Pdf

Augustine's Confessions is a text that seduces. But how often do its readers respond in kind? Here three scholars who share a longstanding fascination with sexuality and Christian discourse attempt to do just that. Where prior interpreters have been inclined either to defend or to criticize Augustine's views, Virginia Burrus, Mark Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick set out both to seduce and to be seduced by his text. Often ambivalent but always passionately engaged, their readings of the Confessions center on four sets of intertwined themes--secrecy and confession, asceticism and eroticism, constraint and freedom, and time and eternity. Rather than expose Augustine's sexual history, they explore how the Confessions conjoins the erotic with the hidden, the imaginary, and the fictional. Rather than bemoan the repressiveness of his text, they uncover the complex relationship between seductive flesh and persuasive words that pervades all of its books. Rather than struggle to escape the control of the author, they embrace the painful pleasure of willed submission that lies at the erotic heart not only of the Confessions but also of Augustine's broader understanding of sin and salvation. Rather than mourn the fateful otherworldliness of his theological vision, they plumb the bottomless depths of beauty that Augustine discovers within creation, thereby extending desire precisely by refusing satisfaction. In unfolding their readings, the authors draw upon other works in Augustine's corpus while building on prior Augustinian scholarship in their own overlapping fields of history, theology, and philosophy. They also press well beyond the conventional boundaries of scholarly disciplines, conversing with such wide-ranging theorists of eroticism as Barthes, Baudrillard, Klossowski, Foucault, and Harpham. In the end, they offer not only a fresh interpretation of Augustine's famous work but also a multivocal literary-philosophical meditation on the seductive elusiveness of desire, bodies, language, and God.

Author : Kim Paffenroth,John Doody,Helene Tallon Russell
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2017-09-20
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781498561853

Get Book

Augustine and Kierkegaard by Kim Paffenroth,John Doody,Helene Tallon Russell Pdf

This volume is a continuation of our series exploring Saint Augustine’s influence on later thought, this time bringing the fifth century bishop into dialogue with 19th century philosopher, theologian, social critic, and originator of Existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard. The connections, contrasts, and sometimes surprising similarities of their thought are uncovered and analyzed in topics such as exile and pilgrimage, time and restlessness, inwardness and the church, as well as suffering, evil, and humility. The implications of this analysis are profound and far-reaching for theology, ecclesiology, and ethics.

Author : Mike Higton,Jim Fodor
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 450 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2015-03-24
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781317532026

Get Book

The Routledge Companion to the Practice of Christian Theology by Mike Higton,Jim Fodor Pdf

This Companion introduces readers to the practice of Christian theology, covering what theologians do, why they do it, and what steps readers can take in order to become theological practitioners themselves. The volume aims to capture the variety of practices involved in doing theology, highlighting the virtues that guide them and the responsibilities that shape them. It also shows that the description of these practices, virtues and responsibilities is itself theological: what Christian theologians do is shaped by the wider practices and beliefs of Christianity. Written by a team of leading theologians, the Companion provides a unique resource for students and scholars of theology alike.

Author : Jeffrey F. Nicoll
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2016-06-03
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781498224949

Get Book

Augustine's Problem by Jeffrey F. Nicoll Pdf

Augustine's Problem provides a new approach to St. Augustine's life and doctrine, hypothesizing that his problem was not sexual addiction but sexual impotence. For Augustine, the problem with sex was not the seductive nature of women, but the unpredictability of desire, which can induce an unwanted erection or fail to provide one when even the mind would choose to have sex. He extends his personal incapacity to a general impotence of the will--we can never, without grace, choose any good. Just as the impotent man cannot work on his impotence, we cannot work on our salvation; only God can make a difference and predestines a tiny elect. The disobedience of the Garden is transferred to the disobedience of the male member, guaranteeing that the sin of Eden is transferred, in conception, as original sin. The most controversial elements of Augustine's theology are all linked to the theme of impotence, as expressed in his writings, from the Confessions to the anti-Pelagian works written at the end of his life.

Author : Robin Lane Fox
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 672 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2015-11-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780141965482

Get Book

Augustine by Robin Lane Fox Pdf

WINNER OF THE WOLFSON PRIZE FOR HISTORY 2015 A major new interpretation of how one of the great figures of Christian history came to write the greatest of all autobiographies Augustine is the person from the ancient world about whom we know most. He is the author of an intimate masterpiece, the Confessions, which continues to delight its many admirers. In it he writes about his infancy and his schooling in the classics in late Roman North Africa, his remarkable mother, his sexual sins ('Give me chastity, but not yet,' he famously prayed), his time in an outlawed heretical sect, his worldly career and friendships and his gradual return to God. His account of his own eventual conversion is a classic study of anguish, hesitation and what he believes to be God's intervention. It has inspired philosophers, Christian thinkers and monastic followers, but it still leaves readers wondering why exactly Augustine chose to compose a work like none before it. Robin Lane Fox follows Augustine on a brilliantly described journey, combining the latest scholarship with recently found letters and sermons by Augustine himself to give a portrait of his subject which is subtly different from older biographies. Augustine's heretical years as a Manichaean, his relation to non-Christian philosophy, his mystical aspirations and the nature of his conversion are among the aspects of his life which stand out in a sharper light. For the first time Lane Fox compares him with two contemporaries, an older pagan and a younger Christian, each of whom also wrote about themselves and who illumine Augustine's life and writings by their different choices. More than a decade passed between Augustine's conversion and his beginning the Confessions. Lane Fox argues that the Confessions and their thinking were the results of a long gestation over these years, not a sudden change of perspective, but that they were then written as a single swift composition and that its final books are a coherent consummation of its scriptural meditation and personal biography. This exceptional study reminds us why we are so excited and so moved by Augustine's story.

Author : Melissa E. Sanchez
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 349 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2019-08-20
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781479871872

Get Book

Queer Faith by Melissa E. Sanchez Pdf

Uncovers the queer logics of premodern religious and secular texts Putting premodern theology and poetry in dialogue with contemporary theory and politics, Queer Faith reassess the commonplace view that a modern veneration of sexual monogamy and fidelity finds its roots in Protestant thought. What if this narrative of “history and tradition” suppresses the queerness of its own foundational texts? Queer Faith examines key works of the prehistory of monogamy—from Paul to Luther, Petrarch to Shakespeare—to show that writing assumed to promote fidelity in fact articulates the affordances of promiscuity, both in its sexual sense and in its larger designation of all that is impure and disorderly. At the same time, Melissa E. Sanchez resists casting promiscuity as the ethical, queer alternative to monogamy, tracing instead how ideals of sexual liberation are themselves attached to nascent racial and economic hierarchies. Because discourses of fidelity and freedom are also discourses on racial and sexual positionality, excavating the complex historical entanglement of faith, race, and eroticism is urgent to contemporary queer debates about normativity, agency, and relationality. Deliberately unfaithful to disciplinary norms and national boundaries, this book assembles new conceptual frameworks at the juncture of secular and religious thought, political and aesthetic form. It thereby enlarges the contexts, objects, and authorized genealogies of queer scholarship. Retracing a history that did not have to be, Sanchez recovers writing that inscribes radical queer insights at the premodern foundations of conservative and heteronormative culture.

Author : Robert Hunter Craig
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2020-10-29
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781793631367

Get Book

Augustine's Confessions by Robert Hunter Craig Pdf

Augustine's Confessions: Conversion and Consciousness argues two original positions concerning the structure and meaning of the Confessions by Augustine. The structure is found to be a tool used by Augustine in his earlier pre-Confessions writings in which he uses the Allegory of the Cave in book VII of the Republic by Plato to both describe human consciousness and as a structural framework for his own life story. As with Plato's allegory, Augustine then uses Books X-XIII to do, what the author calls, "Scriptural Philosophical" analysis of the allegorical prayer previously given. The author shows that the Confessions is really an allegorical quasi-prayer that shows Augustine's state of mind or disposition through space/time—and at the same time uses different personas, schools of thought and metaphysical constructs to show the inadequacy of Plato's consciousness model of the cave to truly describe human ratiocination within consciousness in its totality—Synchronic-Synthetic-Triplex (SST) or body, mind, God-Will substance. Instead, Augustine demonstrates the superiority of the Christian conversion to that of the Platonic as described both by Platonic books and the books of the Platonists. The Christian conversion is based on the incarnate Wisdom of Christ Jesus within the Cave/World.

Author : Margaret R. Miles
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2018-12-18
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781532640575

Get Book

Recollections and Reconsiderations by Margaret R. Miles Pdf

Several years before his death, Augustine of Hippo reviewed his published works, commenting on his purpose in writing each, and correcting, from his present perspective, the mistakes he noticed. Inspired by Augustine’s Retractationes, Miles’s Recollections and Reconsiderations undertakes a similar project, a critical review of almost fifty years of her publications. Rereading and rethinking in chronological order effectively bonds life and thought into a corpus, a body of work with consistent values and interests. Such a review would be an illuminating project for any longtime scholar/student—both rewarding and humbling, an exercise in self-knowledge. Informed by a lifetime of studying Christian traditions, Miles concludes by describing both endemic problems with Christianity, and what she sees is its essence and beauty.

Author : C.C. Pecknold,Tarmo Toom
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2013-08-15
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780567033819

Get Book

The T&T Clark Companion to Augustine and Modern Theology by C.C. Pecknold,Tarmo Toom Pdf

A companion to the influence of St Augustin on modern theology and the response to his work from contemporary thinkers.

Author : Mark Vessey
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 638 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2015-05-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781119025559

Get Book

A Companion to Augustine by Mark Vessey Pdf

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

Author : Granville Hicks,Virginia Burrus
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Cities and towns
ISBN : 082324847X

Get Book

Seducing Augustine by Granville Hicks,Virginia Burrus Pdf

Author : John Doody,Sean Hannan,Kim Paffenroth
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 357 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2021-05-25
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781793637765

Get Book

Augustine and Time by John Doody,Sean Hannan,Kim Paffenroth Pdf

This collection examines the topic of time in the life and works of Augustine of Hippo. Adopting a global perspective on time as a philosophical and theological problem, the volume includes reflections on the meaning of history, the mortality of human bodies, and the relationship between temporal experience and linguistic expression. As Augustine himself once observed, time is both familiar and surprisingly strange. Everyone’s days are structured by temporal rhythms and routines, from watching the clock to whiling away the hours at work. Few of us, however, take the time to sit down and figure out whether time is real or not, or how it is we are able to hold our past, present, and future thoughts together in a straight line so that we can recite a prayer or sing a song. Divided into five sections, the essays collected here highlight the ongoing relevance of Augustine’s work even in settings quite distinct from his own era and context. The first three sections, organized around the themes of interpretation, language, and gendered embodiment, engage directly with Augustine’s own writings, from the Confessions to the City of God and beyond. The final two sections, meanwhile, explore the afterlife of the Augustinian approach in conversation with medieval Islamic and Christian thinkers (like Avicenna and Aquinas), as well as a broad range of Buddhist figures (like Dharmakīrti and Vasubandhu). What binds all of these diverse chapters together is the underlying sense that, regardless of the century or the tradition in which we find ourselves, there is something about the puzzle of temporality that refuses to go away. Time, as Augustine knew, demands our attention. This was true for him in late ancient North Africa. It was also true for Buddhist thinkers in South and East Asia. And it remains just as true for humankind in the twenty-first century, as people around the globe continue to grapple with the reality of time and the challenges of living in a world that always seems to be to be speeding up rather than slowing down.

Author : James Wetzel
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2013-08-08
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781621897873

Get Book

Parting Knowledge by James Wetzel Pdf

There are forms of knowing that seem either to come from a parting or to require one. Paradigmatically in Genesis, Adam parts from God in order to join in knowledge with his partner, the flesh of his flesh, and the result is a bereft but not unpromising knowledge, looking like a labor of love. Saint Augustine famously--some would say infamously--reads the Genesis paradigm of knowing as a story of original sin, where parting is both damnable and disfiguring and reuniting a matter of incomprehensible grace. Roughly half the essays in this collection engage directly with Augustine's theological animus and follow his thinking into self-division, perversity of will, grief, conversion, and the aspiration for transcendence. The remaining ones, more concerned with grace than with sin, bring an animus more distantly Augustinian to the preemption of forgiveness and the persistence of hell, morality and its limits, sexual piety, strange beauty, and a philosophy that takes in confession. The common pull of all the essays is towards the imperfection in self-knowledge--a place of disfigurement perhaps, but also a nod to transformation.

Author : Steven Schafer
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 243 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2019-09-09
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781532671845

Get Book

Marriage, Sex, and Procreation by Steven Schafer Pdf

The contemporary church's debate on the inclusion of same-sex individuals and their relationships has devolved into diametrically opposed positions. Rather than resolving the argument, the conversation between the two sides reflects the impasse that is taking place in denominations across the West. It is clear that the dispute cannot be resolved while couched in these terms. In this timely work, Steven Schafer invites the reader to move beyond the terms of the current debate toward the underlying doctrinal concerns so often glossed over by that discussion. This book is a work of hermeneutics that engages the contemporary discussion on the legitimacy of same-sex relationships with the grand theological narrative handed down by the church. By placing four contemporary revisionists in dialogue with the work of Augustine, the book provides language and theological avenues to reframe the debate and contributes to the church's ongoing discernment.

Author : Sarah Coakley
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 389 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2013-08-29
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780521552288

Get Book

God, Sexuality, and the Self by Sarah Coakley Pdf

A creative new venture in systematic theology which tackles the intrinsic relation of God and 'sexuality'.