On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self - (Reading Augustine) by Ian Clausen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Reading Augustineseries presents concise, personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religious scholars.

Ian Clausen's On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self describes Augustine's central ideas on morality and how he arrived at them. Describing an intellectual journey that will resonate especially with readers at the beginning of their own journey, Clausen shows that Augustine's early writing career was an outworking of his own inner turmoil and discovery, and that both were to summit, triumphantly, on his monumental book Confessions(AD 386-401).

On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Selfoffers a way of looking at Augustine's early writing career as an on-going, developing process: a process whose chief result was to shape a conception of the moral self that has lasted and prospered to the present day.

Review Quotes

Clausen's main idea remains a convincing and attractive one ... Strongly recommended book.
Augustiniana

Perhaps not surprisingly ... I began to like this book more and more, and Augustine for that matter, as soon as I abandoned the dispassionate reviewer's stance, and even more having reflected on its reflexive account of my ignorance. Here, I suggest, is where good theology wins over religious studies: it encourages such readerly engagement.
New Blackfriars

The passionate desire to know who we are and where we are going, a passion we usually associate with Augustine's Confessions, is uncovered and explored by Ian Clausen in this discussion of Augustine's earlier writings. While engaging throughout with other scholarly treatments of those writings, Clausen never lets his readers forget that much more than scholarly debate is at stake in the questions Augustine invites us to ponder.
Gilbert Meilaender, Senior Research Professor of Theology, Valparaiso University, USA

About the Author

Ian Clausen is Arthur J. Ennis Postdoctoral Fellow at Villanova University, USA. He previously held a two-year post at Valparaiso University as a Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow. His research centers on Augustine and the Augustinian moral tradition, and extends to 21st-century debates on technology, moral theory and formation, and the good life. His publications appear in journals such as Augustinian Studies, Religions, Expository Times, Radical Orthodoxy, and Studies in Christian Ethics. He is a former British Marshall Scholar.