Saint Augustine is one of the most influential figures in all of Christianity, yet his path to sainthood was by no means assured. Born in AD 354 to a pagan father and a Christian mother, Augustine spent the first thirty years of his life struggling to understand the nature of God and his world. He learned about Christianity as a child but was never baptized, choosing instead to immerse himself in the study of rhetoric, Manicheanism, and then Neoplatonism—all...

"While many know of the great Christian bishop St. Augustine of Hippo, few consider the deeply influential women in his life. Drawing upon their depictions in his startlingly intimate memoir, the Confessions, it becomes clear that Augustine's canonical Western text goes beyond autobiography to reveal a history of the Classical World as seen through the eyes of women. More than an iconic figurehead, Augustine was also a young man torn between the pangs...

The "Long Debate" on the nature of truth, the scale of real values, the life one should aspire to live, the character of justice, the sources of law, and the terms of civic and political life is encompassed by the name philosophy. Three persistent themes--understood as problems--are knowledge, conduct, and governance, on which there is a storehouse of insights, some so utterly persuasive as to have shaped thought itself. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle,...