Augustine of Hippo

The Enchiridion, or handbook, of St. Augustine of Hippo includes Augustine's discourses on the Graces necessary for Christian worship of God: Faith, Hope and Love. Each Grace is discussed in depth; Faith includes Augustine's use of the Apostles' Creed in teaching Christian doctrine and refuting heresies. Hope is an explanation of using the Lord's Prayer as a template for Christian prayer. Love includes a discourse of Christian love. Written for a friend, Laurentius, this timeless classic is very much relevant today for aiding the Christian walk.

St. Augustine of Hippo is one of the most influential and recognizable figures in Church history. Based on his greatest spiritual works, including Confessions and City of God, Rejoice in the Lord is an ideal prayer companion for busy people who want to ground their spiritual life in Augustine's timeless vision of the soul's journey to God. Requiring only a few minutes of your time each day, Rejoice in the Lord is an easy-to-use, thirty-day devotional that invites you to examine your heart, transform your desires, and discover the abiding joy of resting in the presence of God. Each book in the 30 Days with a Great Spiritual Teacher series provides a month of daily readings from one of Christianity's most beloved spiritual guides. For each day there is a brief and accessible morning meditation drawn from the mystic's writings, a simple mantra for use throughout the day, and a night prayer to focus one's thoughts as the day ends.

We need a vision of how medicine might serve the good of the whole human person: the body’s health, but also the health of that “piece of divinity in us.” Medicine, so long as you don’t need it, is a tangential part of life, just one more profession among others. Until that is, a loved one suffers an accident or falls sick. Then, suddenly, medicine is quite literally, a matter of life or death. Medicine is also big business. Doctors have been reclassified as “service providers,” and patients are “clients.” Such commercialism breeds false incentives and inequalities, even in nations. We need a vision of how medicine might serve the good of the whole human person: the body’s health, but also the health of that “piece of divinity in us.” We need love and reverence for humans as they are, not humans as technology may someday engineer them to be. Jesus, the healer from Nazareth, showed what it means to love the imperfect, the frail, the average. The glory of the medical profession is that it is dedicated to these works of mercy. In today’s money-driven healthcare industry, such tasks are often poorly rewarded. Yet they’re at the heart of medicine’s original mission. Also in this issue: original poetry by Suzanne Harlan Heyd; reviews of new books by Barbara Ehrenreich, Ryan T. Anderson, Beth Macy, and David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé; and art by Tim Lowly, Michelangelo, Julian Peters, Wanjin Gim, Scott Goldsmith, Jan Mostaert, Suleiman Mansour, Cécile Massie, Peter Doig, Erin Hanson, and Jason Landsel. Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus’ message into practice and find common cause with others.

In this book, St. Augustine, leads us to discover and defend the truths of Scripture, and urges us to interpret it with the light of faith, hope, and charity, in order to understand the Word of God fully. He devises the means to recognize figurative expressions and doubtful language, and suggests consulting primary sources, committing difficult terms to memory, and familiarizing ourselves with the meaning of frequently used symbols, such as "shepherd" and "sheep." For those who teach Scripture, St. Augustine says they must teach in all honesty, and not for self-serving purposes. This book offers an impressive wealth of practical wisdom for reading the Bible. It soon becomes apparent that St. Augustine earnestly wanted us to understand the Word of God.

‘A canticle to God, and full of psychological insights that might have been written yesterday, the Confessions are the story of a soul, and also the story of God, and how he is constantly at work seeking us.’ Confessions is perhaps the most important spiritual autobiography of all: it chronicles Saint Augustine’s wild, dissonant youth and subsequent conversion to Christianity, as well as providing significant divine and philosophical insight. Bestselling author, Fr Benignus O’Rourke OSA, provides a new and luminescent translation of Confessions, his beautiful and eloquent prose shedding new light on the various shades of meaning in Saint Augustine’s meditations and stories. Each book is prefaced with an introduction providing further accessibility and depth of understanding to this seminal work. Fr Benignus O’Rourke O. S. A is an Augustinian friar and a member of the community at Clare Priory, Suffolk, and the bestselling author of Finding Your Hidden Treasure (DLT, 2010).