Overview

Since his retirement as Archbishop of Canterbury and his return to academic life (Master of Magdalene College Cambridge) Rowan Williams has demonstrated a massive new surge of intellectual energy. In this new book he turns his attention to St Augustine. St Augustine not only shaped the development of Western theology, he also made a major contribution to political theory (City of God) and through his Confessions to the understanding of human psychology. Rowan Williams has an entirely fresh perspective on these matters and the chapter titles in this new book demonstrate this at a glance - 'Language Reality and Desire', 'Politics and the Soul', 'Paradoxes of Self Knowledge', 'Insubstantial Evil'. As with his previous titles, Dostoevsky, The Edge of Words and Faith in the Public Square this new study is sure to be a major contribution on a compelling subject.

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9781472925275

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Rowan Williams is a superb and sophisticated advocate for Augustine against his critics ... His On Augustine is a brilliant example of how classical Christian theology thinks for the present by close re-reading of great thinkers of the past. Professor Frances Young, University of Birmingham This book is one of the most substantive, wide-ranging and provoking theological engagements with Augustine's corpus available in English - and it is one of Williams' finest theological texts. Augustine is embraced, but also creatively stretched and resisted; to watch this movement is to see Williams performing his vision of how the Christian tradition should be engaged. Lewis Ayres, Professor of Catholic and Historical Theology, University of Durham This is a book that I have been waiting all my adult life to read - though I did not realise it ... Again and again, I put this book down and wished that it were compulsory reading for all those who, in our public forum, think that they are engaging in intelligible conversations when they are merely mouthing sounds. -- A N Wilson New Statesman

Rowan Williams is a superb and sophisticated advocate for Augustine against his critics ... His On Augustine is a brilliant example of how classical Christian theology thinks for the present by close re-reading of great thinkers of the past. Professor Frances Young, University of Birmingham This book is one of the most substantive, wide-ranging and provoking theological engagements with Augustine's corpus available in English - and it is one of Williams' finest theological texts. Augustine is embraced, but also creatively stretched and resisted; to watch this movement is to see Williams performing his vision of how the Christian tradition should be engaged. Lewis Ayres, Professor of Catholic and Historical Theology, University of Durham

Author Information

Rowan Williams was Professor of Divinity at Oxford before becoming Bishop of Monmouth in 1992. After ten years as Archbishop of Canterbury, he became Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 2013, and is internationally well-known as a theologian, poet and commentator on current affairs.

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