Mark Vessey

Saint Augustine (Bishop of Hippo.)

Albert C. Outler

One of the first personal histories ever written, The Confessions of St. Augustine offers more than a gripping narrative of one man's battle against doubt. It is also a brilliant work of theology that helped set the foundation for much of modern Christian thought.

Confessions

By close engagement with both traditional and contemporary approaches to ancient Christian literature, Latin Christian Writers in Late Antiquity and their Texts seeks to delineate a historiographical problem, at the same time rendering patristics as part of the subject-matter of a new literary history. After preliminary essays marking out the field, the volume is organized in three sections by authors, forms of discourse, and disciplines. Released from the theological discipline of patristics, the writings of the church fathers have in recent decades become the common property of students of early Christianity, late antiquity and the classical tradition. In principle, they are now no more (nor less) than sources, documents and literary texts like others from their period and milieux. Yet when replaced in the longer history of Western textual and literary practices, the collective literary oeuvre of Latin clerics, monks and ascetic freelances of the Later Roman Empire may still seem to occupy a place of decisive, if not canonical importance. How does one now account for the abiding formativeness of Latin Christian writing of the fourth and fifth centuries CE? What demands does such writing lay on a modern history of literature? These are the questions asked here, in view of a new literary history of patristic texts.

Latin Christian Writers in Late Antiquity and their Texts

Harry O. Maier

Sharon Betcher

Robert Daum

Current notions of nationhood, communal identity, territorial entitlement, and collective destiny are deeply rooted in historic interpretations of the Bible. Interweaving elements of history, theology, literary criticism, and cultural theory, the essays in this volume discuss the ways in which biblical understandings have shaped Western – and particularly European and North American – assumptions about the nature and meaning of the nation. Part of the Green College Lecture Series, this wide-ranging collection moves from the earliest Pauline and Rabbinic exegesis through Christian imperial and missionary narratives of the late Roman, medieval, and early modern periods to the entangled identity politics of 'mainstream' nineteenth-and twentieth-century North America. Taken together, the essays show that, while theories of globalization, postmodernism, and postcolonialism have all offered critiques of identity politics and the nation-state, the global present remains heavily informed by biblical-historical intuitions of nationhood.

Exegesis, Ethnography, and Empire in a Biblical-Historic Present

The Calling of the Nations

Karla Pollmann

Augustine and the Disciplines takes its cue from Augustine's theory of the liberal arts to explore the larger question of how the Bible became the focus of medieval culture in the West. Augustine himself became increasingly aware that an ambivalent attitude towards knowledge and learning was inherent in Christianity. By facing the intellectual challenge posed by this tension he arrived at a new theory of how to interpret the Bible correctly. The topics investigated hereinclude: Augustine's changing relationship with the 'disciplines', as he moved from an attempt at their Christianization (in the philosophical dialogues of Cassiciacum) to a radical reshaping of them within a Christian world-view (in the De Doctrina Christiana and Confessiones); the factors that prompted andfacilitated his change of perspective; and the ways in which Augustine's evolving theory reflected contemporary trends in Christian pedagogy.

From Cassiciacum to Confessions

Augustine and the Disciplines

Hilmar M. Pabel

Holy Scripture Speaks reveals the rich complexity of the literary, theological, and cultural dimensions of Erasmus' Paraphrases on the New Testament and indicates future directions that research in this area should take.

The Production and Reception of Erasmus' Paraphrases on the New Testament

Holy Scripture Speaks

This wide-ranging collection moves from the earliest Pauline and Rabbinic exegesis through Christian imperial and missionary narratives of the late Roman, medieval, and early modern periods to the entangled identity politics of 'mainstream' nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America.

Exegesis, Ethnography, and Empire in a Biblical-historic Present

A Companion to Augustine presents a fresh collection ofscholarship by leading academics with a new approach tocontextualizing Augustine and his works within themulti-disciplinary field of Late Antiquity, showing Augustine asboth a product of the cultural forces of his times and a culturalforce in his own right. Discusses the life and works of Augustine within their fullhistorical context, rather than privileging the theologicalcontext Presents Augustine’s life, works and leading ideas in thecultural context of the late Roman world, providing a vibrant andengaging sense of Augustine in action in his own time andplace Opens up a new phase of study on Augustine, sensitive to themany and varied perspectives of scholarship on late Romanculture State-of-the-art essays by leading academics in this field

Mark Vessey

Books

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