Martin Luther, one of the foremost leaders of the Protestant Reformation, sought to reject much of the doctrine and authority of the Catholic Church, yet many of his theological and political ideas are extremely reflective of the Catholic luminary...

All Christians desire to be closer to God, and ultimately, to be with Him after death. But how does one grow closer to God? There are two possible answers to this question. The simplest answer is that all one needs to do is have faith in the words...

She told him about...country sounds and country smells and of how fresh and clean everything in the country is. She said that heought to live there and that if he did, he would find that all his troubles were city troubles.

-Nathanael West, Miss...

Saint Augustine dwells upon the nature and origin of evil throughout his Confessions. Morality is an inextricable part of religion and religious doctrine, but the question seems to hold some greater weight for him beyond the teachings of the...

As society's rules and ideals have changed over time, so have their

definitions of evil been completely revolutionized. While today evil is something morally wrong, a violation of some universal law, it was not always seen in the same light. St....

From its beginnings, literature has been characterized to a remarkable degree by narratives and images of journeys. What gets many texts started and what keeps them going is very commonly a journey of some sort. However, these journeys are not...

"Here I saw people more numerous than before, on

one side and the other, with great cries rolling

weights by the force of their chests" (Inferno 7.25-27)

"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill man's heart. We have to imagine...

One of the most important Christian writers, St. Augustine acts as a bridge between the Classical period and Late Antiquity. His autobiography about personal struggles, conversion, and contemplation about God sheds light on both how people of Late...

Galileo Galilei once stated that “all truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” However, in order to understand and discover such truths, one needs the light of wisdom and the guidance of virtue. In...

In St. Augustine’s Confessions, language was necessary on Augustine’s path to conversion, but also caused him to deviate from the same path. By being able to speak and read, Augustine first learned about God, while his final conversion in the...

In Augustine’s Confessions, he has an internal conflict about his hesitation to convert to Christianity. He claims to disagree with the Manichean ways and beliefs, and lists his reasons why in several passages. The subject of these passages is...

Throughout time, countless people have sought to understand what the good life is and how to achieve it. One such person is Saint Augustine, who details in Confessions his path to achieving the good life through God. Throughout the book, Augustine...

The Confessions illustrates many times through which Saint Augustine appears to desire and pursue pain throughout his life, made especially clear in the beginning of Book III. His apparent desire for pain is a surprising concept for a man who so...

The Confessions by Saint Augustine is a book composed of three main, extremely distinct sections. The first is a narrative-style part, telling of his life up to the point of writing The Confessions and confessing to his sins along the way. The...

In Confessions of Saint Augustine, the reader is presented with many puzzles and seeming contradictions in terms of the structure of the work and how it mirrors, or does not mirror, Augustine’s spiritual journey. Some have argued that the book is...

In Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Augustine displays remarkable rhetoric in his attempt to elucidate his relationship with God. Augustine’s prowess in prose suggests that language is an esteemed value for him and a vital tool that complements the...

In "The Politics" Aristotle made an explicit rationale for subordination. He suggested that some human beings may possess an innate fitness for either slavery or rule, and that those who are enslaved deserve to be so entirely because they have...

In The City of God, Augustine goes to great lengths to explain the distinction between living according to God and living according to man using an analogy of two cities. With this distinction, he shows that living according to God is superior...

In his book, “The City of God,” Saint Augustine of Hippo writes to defend Christianity against pagan claims of abandonment from God. When the city of Rome fell in 410, many citizens argued that it was Christianity’s fault, but Augustine says that...

In Fernando Meirelles’ film City of God (2002) the audience is introduced to and follows the life of Rocket, and his affiliation with Li’l Zé (formerly Li’l Dice), a gang leader in the City of God. In one of the final scenes of the film, a...

To the average human, happiness lives as a personal goal. If we may not receive any of our desires in life, may we, at the least, possess happiness in the lives that we lead. St. Augustine, however, would argue the fruitlessness of this pursuit....