St. Augustine and J.R.R. Tolkien

By |2024-02-15T20:13:18-06:00February 15th, 2024|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature, Myth, Senior Contributors, St. Augustine, StAR, Timeless Essays|

As did St. Augustine as the barbarians tore through Rome’s gate on August 24, 410, at midnight, J.R.R. Tolkien looked out over a ruined world: a world on one side controlled by ideologues, and, consequently, a world of the Gulag, the Holocaust camps, the Killing fields, and total war; on the other: a world of [...]

On Saint Patrick, Saint Augustine, Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh), & Us

By |2023-09-18T17:26:25-05:00September 18th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Foreign Affairs, Saint Patrick, St. Augustine, Western Civilization|

The West's primary threat still lies in the East. And yet, like the late Romans and Byzantines—and the Roman captives whom Saint Patrick encountered—we are poised to surrender people, churches, monuments, and lands rather than stand our ground. Last Spring, I read a biographical novel about Saint Patrick. We do not have much firsthand information [...]

The Restless Heart

By |2023-09-15T21:09:19-05:00September 15th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Sainthood, St. Augustine|

Why do we try to fill our searching hearts with fleeting things? Like St. Augustine, our search goes astray and we are disappointed. It is the paradox of the world. We are surrounded by finite, earthly goods, but in the end, we were made for eternal ones. Everyone has experienced the desire for something just [...]

St. Augustine, Modernity, & the Recovery of True Education

By |2023-08-27T13:11:19-05:00August 27th, 2023|Categories: Bradley G. Green, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Featured, Liberal Learning, Modernity, Senior Contributors, St. Augustine, Timeless Essays|

One of the most pressing tasks for contemporary Christians is the recovery and cultivation of the inextricable link between the Christian faith and the intellectual life. In order to engage in such reflection, we should explore the relationship of Christianity and the liberal arts, and in particular seek to draw from Augustine as we reflect [...]

Augustine’s “City of God”: The First Culture War

By |2023-08-27T13:19:28-05:00August 27th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Civil Society, Culture War, Love, Paul Krause, Rome, Senior Contributors, St. Augustine, Timeless Essays|

In “The City of God,” Augustine systematically lays bare the empty ideology of the city of man and the Roman empire in a breathtaking counter-narrative that remains remarkably modern and relevant for today. In contrast to the city of man, the City of Love, Augustine argues, is the godly city to which Christians belong and [...]

Live Your Best Life!

By |2023-08-27T13:22:16-05:00January 27th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Glenn Arbery, Sainthood, Senior Contributors, St. Augustine, Wyoming Catholic College|

Why is St. Augustine’s conviction of his own sinfulness the true path? Because he acknowledges that his misery is his own fault—in other words, that he had real agency in his turn away from what was truly good and beautiful. A few days ago, I happened upon a review of Deepak Chopra’s latest book, Living [...]

Books That Make Us Human

By |2023-07-25T17:10:41-05:00November 16th, 2022|Categories: Books, Books that Make Us Human, Catholicism, Conservatism, St. Augustine, Timeless Essays|

Here are my ten recommendations for reading, from Augustine’s “Confessions,” to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, to Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” 1. The Bible. It is one of the first books I read (not cover-to-cover, at first, of course), and the first book I memorized passages from as a child. I cannot imagine trying to think about or comprehend the [...]

Saint Augustine: Founding Philosopher of History

By |2024-02-11T10:37:08-06:00August 27th, 2022|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Classics, History, Plato, St. Augustine, Timeless Essays|

Saint Augustine was the first Christian to offer a comprehensive Philosophy of History, which the Russian Orthodox writer Nicholas Berdyaev called nothing short of “ingenious.”[1] One of his greatest accomplishments was the sanctification of Plato’s understanding of the two realms: the perfect Celestial Kingdom and the corrupt copy. One finds this tension and conflict between [...]

Religious Liberty and the Reality of the Christian Tradition

By |2023-08-19T09:01:50-05:00March 17th, 2022|Categories: American Republic, Christianity, Communio, Essential, Freedom of Religion, Humanum, St. Augustine|

Christ assumed the whole of humanity in his assumption of the individual human nature received from and through his mother Mary. Politics is about the final end of human existence, and so politics has an essential relation to the Christian claim. The claim cannot be avoided; it can only be affirmed or denied. When thinking [...]

The Political Relevance of St. Augustine

By |2022-02-25T11:54:04-06:00February 25th, 2022|Categories: Aristotle, Christendom, Christianity, Essential, Politics, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Timeless Essays|

St. Augustine observed, “To begin with, there never has been, nor, is there today, any absence of hostile foreign powers to provoke war.” Evil men lusting after power—aggressors—are endemic to human history, and noted Augustine, “When they go to war what they want is to make, if they can, their enemies their own, and then [...]

Looking Beyond the Bloody Chaos of History

By |2022-02-18T10:13:41-06:00February 12th, 2022|Categories: Christendom, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Quotation, St. Augustine|

It was in this age of ruin and distress that St. Augustine lived and worked. To the materialist, nothing could be more futile than the spectacle of Augustine busying himself with the reunion of the African Church and the refutation of the Pelagians, while civilisation was falling to pieces about his ears. It would seem [...]

Hebraic Exceptionalism and Western Exceptionalism

By |2023-10-08T19:42:06-05:00November 7th, 2020|Categories: Bible, Christianity, Paul Krause, Senior Contributors, St. Augustine, Western Civilization|

The Hebrew Bible—in a sea of competitors—survived and bequeathed to the West many of our cherished principles and values. For this reason, the Bible is exceptional. To abandon the Hebrew Bible is not only to abandon the roots of our modern sensibilities and values, but ultimately to abandon the wellspring of the religion that nurtured [...]

Words, Signs, and Reality

By |2020-08-13T15:57:27-05:00August 13th, 2020|Categories: Christianity, Christine Norvell, Language, Senior Contributors, St. Augustine, Truth|

Frequently in public forums, people forget Augustine’s simple truth: Words fail or succeed based on what truth or reality they represent to their audience. Augustine would ask us to further the “mutual intercourse of men” and remember that words serve us by their remembrance, their representation, and their reality. As a literature teacher, I thought [...]

“The Language of God”: The Man Who Saw God Through a Microscope

By |2020-07-07T10:41:40-05:00July 7th, 2020|Categories: Books, Christianity, Darwin, Existence of God, Faith, Nature, Reason, Science, St. Augustine|

In “The Language of God,” Francis Collins breaks into the debate between faith and reason with intelligible writing and with the strength of his experience as a scientist and the nine-years director of the Human Genome Project. He is a man who found God while deciphering the hidden codes of life. The Language of God: [...]

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