Miles Hollingworth is Research Fellow in the History of Ideas at St. John's College, Durham University, in the United Kingdom. His writing on Augustine has won awards from the Society of Authors (2009 Elizabeth Longford Grant for Historical Biography) and the Royal Society of Literature (2009 Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction). He is the author of The Pilgrim City: St. Augustine of Hippo and his Innovation in Political Thought, which was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone History Book Prize
"[An] ambitious and comprehensive work."--Church of Ireland
Gazette"Hollingworth shows why it is that Augustine has such broad
appeal; not just because he finds him surprisingly humane and
enlightened about our propensity to sin but because of the positive
spin that he puts on the absence of God experience and the hope of
meaning that his interpretation of the restless heart gives to
those who suffer existential angst and radical doubt. This is
therefore a book for all seekers after the Truth: theist and
atheist as well as all lovers of Augustine."--Margaret Lane,
Theology"Hollingworth brings out the underlying vision and the
lived meaning of Augustine's thought ... This book shares
Augustine's concern to relate his life to the reader's own, and to
require of readers an engagement with their own cultural and
personal history. It is at times demanding, even frustrating.
Readers will probably vary widely in their judgement of its success
or failure, but success or failure must also attend upon the
reader's work, as she or he squares up to Augustine's vision."
--Journal of Theological Studies"Learned and well
documented."--Claremont Review of Books"Relying primarily on
Augustine's Confessions in order to unearth how the experiences of
the young Augustine shaped the theology of the older clergyman,
Hollingworth interweaves Augustine's theological insights with his
personal plights in a lively and lyrical manner. In eleven
chapters, Hollingworth covers diverse themes in Augustine's life
under headings such as "Augustine's remarks on his parents"
(chapter 3),"Manichaeism" (chapter 7), and "On the singular
deportment of death, love, and grief" (chapter 8). Hollingworth's
biography exercises the reader's historical, philosophical,
psychological, and psychoanalytic imagination..." --Bryn Mawr
Classical Review
"This is a book whose style and feel are really worthy of Augustine
himself--humane and probing, full of telling metaphor and
seriousness about the strangeness of human experience. It is
capable of doing for a new generation a great deal of what Peter
Brown's epochal biography did half a century ago." --Rowan
Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury"Hollingworth patiently
explains Augustine to the contemporary reader, imagined as someone
in whom a na�ve historicism holds sway and in whom Augustine's
claims, such as the damnation of unbaptized infants and the value
of virginity, are easily ridiculed. He does so by an appeal to the
human struggles of a great man. This type of presentation justifies
the subtitle, 'An Intellectual Biography'; it is a study that
embeds a person's ideas within their historical context. One can
query this approach and raise issues concerning the historiography,
but it brings readers closer to Augustine in all his complexity."
--Heythrop Journal
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
