The City of God: Selections and Introduction by Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Few books have impacted the West as deeply as St. Augustine's The City of God, not only in politics and philosophy, but in the spirit, with its exploration of the relationship between a loving God and a shattered world. Thomas Aquinas, Charlemagne, John Calvin, Hannah Arendt, and Pope Benedict XVI all drew from the text's deep and varied wells.

Yet few of us will ever read the gargantuan work which stretches past one thousand pages. This volume, however, edited by Hans Urs von Balthasar, of...