An Augustinian Renewal?

Renewal of interest in the most influential father of the church is growing, perhaps because of crises in today’s churches, perhaps because of today’s faltering empires East and West. Consider the books by David Naugle, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Eric Gregory, Kristen Johnson, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and William Stevenson:

• David Naugle, professor of philosophy at Dallas Baptist University and known for an earlier book, Worldview: The History of a Concept, is the author of a new volume, Reordered Love, Reordered Lives: Learning the Deep Meaning of Happiness (Eerdmans). The title itself points to Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo (354-430) and Naugle engages him throughout the first half of the book.
• Nicholas Wolterstorff, professor of philosophy emeritus at Yale University Divinity School and before that a professor at Calvin College, is the author most recently of Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton). Wolterstorff gives detailed attention to love and justice in Augustine on pp. 180-226.
• Last year we announced Eric Gregory’s book, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago). Gregory, who is professor of religion at Princeton University, is concerned, as Naugle and Wolterstorff are, with contemporary life and thought, but he too goes back to Augustine to gain a sturdy foundation.
• We also announced Kristen Deede Johnson’s book last year: Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism (Cambridge). Johnson, who teaches at Hope College, seeks grounds for tolerance and pluralism, and she critically evaluates contemporary thinkers, including John Milbank, who returned to Augustine more than a decade ago.
• In the mid-1990s, Jean Bethke Elshtain authored Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame). The book touches many dimensions of life and the wide terrain of Augustine’s concerns as pastor, thinker, and public intellectual. Elshtain is a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
• William R. Stevenson, a professor of politics at Calvin College, is the author of Christian Love and Just War: Moral Paradox and Political Life in St. Augustine and His Modern Interpreters (Mercer University Press). Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey are the primary modern interpreters of Augustine whom Stevenson engages. 

January 12, 2009