Overview

On Memory, Marriage, Tears, and Meditation offers readers the tools for reading Augustine’s journey to human emotions through his writings on feeling, marriage, conversion, and meditation. Augustine understood that feeling, not rationality, gathers and reveals the deep longing of the whole person. Throughout his ecclesiastical career, he discussed marriage in sermons, letters, and treatises from the perspective of his own experience. Miles examines Augustine’s prototypes for conversion – reading and conversion; sacrifice and conversion; and the importance of friends in what might be considered a subjective and private process. Meditation was central to Augustine’s Christian life and Miles argues that his practice of meditation suggests that penitence included a rich range of feeling leading to gratitude, peace, wonder, and love.

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9781350191426

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In this elegant book, Margaret R. Miles reflects on a lifetime of reading Augustine. Examining Augustine's ideas about marriage, conversion, emotion and meditation, and her own varied responses to Augustine over some fifty years, Miles produces a profoundly rich and evocative work on what it means to read for life. -- Jane Shaw, Professor of the History of Religion, University of Oxford, UK I know of no one better equipped than Margaret R. Miles to fathom the depths of Augustine's deathbed tears. She brings to the scene an alchemical mix of historical discretion, scholarly ingenuity, patient self-awareness, and well-tempered love. This is reading as a spiritual art form. -- James Wetzel, Villanova University, USA

Author Information

Margaret R. Miles is Professor Emerita of Historical Theology at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, USA. She is the author of Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter (2014), The Long Goodbye: Dementia Diaries (2017), and Recollections and Reconsiderations (2018).

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