Aurelius Augustinus was a key figure in the transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages. He lived at a time when no distinction was made between philosophy and theology, and the purpose of both was to show the way to wisdom, happiness, and blessedness. Augustinian thought is perhaps best capsulated in Anselm's famous maxim: "I believe in order to understand." Augustine believed the principal business of life is to arrive at the blissful vision of God, but he came to see that this can be done only after death. Only eternal and unchangeable goods are worth enjoying, and all other joys or pleasures are mere stops along the way. Temporal life is a "living death, a dying life"; its primary characteristic is the dizzying flux of time and change. Evil is not an active, threatening force; it is a lack, a privation, a corruption. For Augustine, every time we make a judgment of relative value, we implicitly acknowledge an absolute standard of value; and this absolute is God. Our final end, the contemplation of God after death, is a blissful, changeless, restful, and peaceful stillness of vision.
Following the extraordinary success of the New York Times bestseller Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas latest book offers inspirational and intellectually rigorous thoughts about the great questions surrounding us all today.
The Greek philosopher Socrates f...
Narrator: Eric Metaxas and the contributing authors Published: 10/13/2011
In 2006, Christianity Today voted The God Who Is There as one of the top fifty books that have shaped evangelicals.
For decades, The God Who Is There has been the landmark book that changed the way the church sees the world. In Francis Schaeffers r...
Kierkegaard wasnt really a philosopher in the academic sense. Yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. He didnt write about the world, he wrote about life, about how we live and how we choose to live. His subject was the individual and...
In the late 13th century, this quiet reflective Dominican scholar concentrated his work on philosophical concerns that today would be considered to be partly theological. He combined the work of Aristotle with Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and pagan th...
Through interviews with twelve distinguished philosophers-including atheists, agnostics, and believers-Talking God works toward a philosophical understanding and evaluation of religion. Along the way, Gary Gutting and his interviewees challenge many...
Renowned psychiatrist and educator Armand Nicholi here presents a fascinating comparison of the beliefs of Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis. For all the variety of specific religious beliefs, there are fundamentally only two kinds of people: believe...
Twenty-seven years ago, Matthieu Ricard gave up a promising career as a scientist to study Tibetan Buddhism-not as a detached observer but by immersing himself in its practice under the guidance of its greatest living masters. Years later, this proj...
Orthodoxy was named as one of Publishers Weekly's 10 indispensable spiritual classics of the past 1500 years. It is the personal journal of one man's search for understanding culminating in his conversion to Catholicism. Written with wisdom and wit,...
Narrator: John Franklyn-Robbins Published: 09/17/2013
With the same passionate scholarship and analytical audacity he brought to the character of God, Jack Miles now approaches the literary and theological enigma of Jesus. In so doing, he tells the story of a broken promise–God’s ancient c...
