Augustine Our Contemporary

"This original collection of essays by stellar authors in the field addresses the paradoxical question that animates the best of philosophical and philological inquiry into the future of the religious and theological past: To what current uses can the archive and apparatus of early Christian, patristic, and medieval thought be put, without yielding to anachronistic, myopic, and fundamentally narcissistic appropriations that are the standing temptation of scholars of all generations? Susan E. Schreiner and Willemien Otten frame the project in the most stringent and compelling terms. Their further organization of the material is effective, and the individual articles are well researched, steeped in the thorough analysis and interpretation of primary sources while paying minute attention to the voluminous existing scholarship on Augustine, those who influence him, and those whom he would influence in turn." —Hent de Vries, Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities, New York University, and director, School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University

"Willemien Otten and Susan E. Schreiner's volume demonstrates how Augustine's pioneering struggles with the self provided fertile ground for subsequent Western intellectuals to come to their own conclusions about the essence of the human experience. Readers will be surprised at each turn as venerable themes resurface century after century, invested with new meanings and bearings. Rather than identifying a stable, easily recognized, human core, these essays return the issue to the reader in a most fruitful way, where the self remains an ongoing site of questioning whose boundaries are far from easy to determine." —Paul Kolbet, Yale Divinity School

“The present volume develops several specific themes within the broad Augustinian legacy and thus will be helpful to scholars.” —Choice

“The title of this extraordinary book, Augustine Our Contemporary: Examining the Self in Past and Present, conceals the fact that it is editors’ Willemien Otten and Susan E. Schreiner’s homage to David Tracy, long time Professor of Theology and the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Committee for Social Thought.” —Reading Religion

"Readily engaging an impressive range of Western thought, from the more obvious connections with classic philosophers and Augustine’s contemporaries to twentieth- century philosophy, it is perhaps no small surprise that the “self” appears as an overarching theme.... Such essays invite the reader to find fresh approaches to seemingly outdated concepts and emphasize the utility of engaging with the past in contemplating the present." —Religious Studies Review