Augustine Our Contemporary

Willemien Otten is professor of theology and the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the College. She also directs the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion.Susan E. Schreiner is professor of theology and the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the College.

"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 Such essays invite the reader to find fresh approaches to seemingly outdated concepts and emphasize the utility of engaging with the past in contemplating the present."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"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"The present volume develops several specific themes within the broad Augustinian legacy and thus will be helpful to scholars." —Choice"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"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

• Introduction: Susan E. Schreiner, Augustine Our Contemporary1. David W. Tracy, Augustine Our Contemporary: The Overdetermined, Incomprehensible Self2. Bernard McGinn, Semper agens/Semper quietus: Notes on the History of an Augustinian Theme3. Vincent Carraud, Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love4. Willemien Otten, The Open Self: Augustine and the Early Medieval Ethics of Order5. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Teachers Without and Within6. David C. Steinmetz, Luther and Augustine on Romans 97. Jean-Luc Marion, St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego Cogito8. W. Clark Gilpin, The Augustinian Strain of Piety: Theology and Autobiography in American History9. William Schweiker, The Saint and the Humanities10. Franklin I. Gamwell, The Sources of Temptation11. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and Political Theology12. Fred Lawrence, Cor ad cor loquitur: Augustine's Influence on Heidegger and Lonergan13. Françoise Meltzer, Ruins and TimeNotes on Contributors