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Aug 30, 2005 | ISBN 9780143035985 Buy
Jun 01, 1999 | ISBN 9781101200957 Buy
Dec 21, 1999 | 282 Minutes Buy
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Available from:
Aug 30, 2005 | ISBN 9780143035985
Jun 01, 1999 | ISBN 9781101200957
Dec 21, 1999 | ISBN 9781415910566
282 Minutes
Look out for a new book from Garry Wills, What The Qur’an Meant, coming fall 2017. Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills brings the same fresh scholarship, lively prose, and critical appreciation that characterize his well-known books on religion and American history to this outstanding biography of one of the most influential Christian philosophers.
Saint Augustine follows its subject from his youth in fourth-century Africa to his conversion and subsequent development as a theologian. It challenges the widely held misconceptions about Augustine’s sexual excesses and shows how, in embracing classical philosophy, Augustine managed to enlist “pagan authors” in the defense of Christianity. The result is a biography that makes a spiritual ancestor feel like our contemporary.
For centuries, Augustine’s writings have moved and fascinated readers. With the keen eye of a writer whose own intellectual analysis won him a Pulitzer Prize, Gary Wills examines this famed fourth-century bishop and seminal thinker whose grounding in classical philosophy informed his interpretation of Christian doctrine. Saint Augustine explores Augustine’s thought as well as the everyday man who set pen to parchment. It challenges many misconceptions, including those regarding his early sexual excesses. It portrays Augustine as being “peripheral in his day, a provincial on the margins of classical culture” who didn’t even know Greek. Here is a lively and incisive portrait of a man who helped shape Western thinking. “Wills’s agile mind matches the agility of Saint Augustine. He presents his subject with candor and with empathy.”—New York Times Book Review
Garry Wills is a historian and the author of the New York Times bestsellers What Jesus Meant, Papal Sin, and Why Priests?, among others. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other publications, Wills is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a professor emeritus at Northwestern University…. More about Garry Wills
“Less the history of a man than the progress of a frank, dynamic, jazzy and fiercely serious mind . . . The writing is exceptional throughout– rich and surprising with detail.” –Chicago Tribune “Seldom has this long-familiar figure . . . emerged so fresh and challenging from under so masterful a hand.” –The New York Review of Books “A brilliant biography . . . Garry Will’s agile mind matches the agility of St. Augustine’s. He presents his subject with candor and with empathy.” –The New York Times Book Review
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