On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

by James K. A. Smith

Overview

★ Publishers Weekly starred review

One of the Top 100 Books and One of the 5 Best Books in Religion for 2019, Publishers Weekly

Christianity Today 2020 Book Award Winner (Spiritual Formation)

Outreach 2020 Resource of the Year (Spiritual Growth)

Foreword INDIES 2019 Honorable Mention for Religion

This is not a book about Saint Augustine. In a way, it's a book Augustine has written about each of us. Popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith has spent time on the road with Augustine, and he invites us to take this journey too, for this ancient African thinker knows far more about us than we might expect.

Following Smith's successful You Are What You Love, this book shows how Augustine can be a pilgrim guide to a spirituality that meets the complicated world we live in. Augustine, says Smith, is the patron saint of restless hearts—a guide who has been there, asked our questions, and knows our frustrations and failed pursuits. Augustine spent a lifetime searching for his heart's true home and he can help us find our way. "What makes Augustine a guide worth considering," says Smith, "is that he knows where home is, where rest can be found, what peace feels like, even if it is sometimes ephemeral and elusive along the way." Addressing believers and skeptics alike, this book shows how Augustine's timeless wisdom speaks to the worries and struggles of contemporary life, covering topics such as ambition, sex, friendship, freedom, parenthood, and death. As Smith vividly and colorfully brings Augustine to life for 21st-century readers, he also offers a fresh articulation of Christianity that speaks to our deepest hungers, fears, and hopes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587433894
Publisher:	Baker Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	220,892
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

James K. A. Smith (PhD, Villanova University) is a popular speaker who has written many books, including Awaiting the King, Imagining the Kingdom, How (Not) to Be Secular, and the Christianity Today Book Award winners You Are What You Love, Desiring the Kingdom, and Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? He is professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he holds the Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview. He is editor in chief of Image Journal. Smith has written for Christianity Today, the Christian Century, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Washington Post.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction
Orientation
Heart on the Run
How to Hit the Road
Augustine Our Contemporary
How to Find Yourself
A Refugee Spirituality
How to Live Between
Detours on the Way to Myself
Freedom
How to Escape
Ambition
How to Aspire
Sex
How to Connect
Mothers
How to Be Dependent
Friendship
How to Belong
Enlightenment
How to Believe
Story
How to Be a Character
Justice
How to Protest
Fathers
How to Be Broken
Death
How to Hope
Homecoming
Index

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/05/2019

In this engrossing reflection on the human spiritual journey, philosophy professor Smith (You Are What You Love) uses the fourth-century Bishop of Hippo, Saint Augustine, as a guide for considering complex, timeless issues. Exploring Augustine’s Confessions, which describe his decades-long resistance to God and gradual conversion to Christianity, Smith asserts that Augustine’s insights into freedom, ambition, sex, friendship, parenting, justice, and death have much to say to seekers today. He analyzes Augustine’s influence on philosophers including Arendt, Camus, Derrida, Descartes, and Heidegger, demonstrating that Augustine’s philosophical arguments about issues such as authenticity and alienation continue to resonate with modern thinkers. Smith emphasizes Augustine’s description of Christianity as “a journey of emigration,” in which Christians are migrants searching for home, aware of their dependence, vulnerability, and need of a faith community to help them “nourish new habits” and live faithful lives. Seeking Augustine’s wisdom on questions—such as “what do I want when I want to be noticed?” or “to belong?” or “to be rational?”—Smith illuminates Augustine’s certainty that people find freedom and truth when they find themselves in God’s story. By following Augustine’s model and sharing his own faith journey, Smith makes Augustine’s guidance accessible to a new generation of seekers. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly