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Charity after Augustine: Solidarity, Conflict, and the Practices of Charity in the Latin West

Online ISBN:
9780191905100
Print ISBN:
9780198868620
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Charity after Augustine: Solidarity, Conflict, and the Practices of Charity in the Latin West

Published online:
2 December 2024
Published in print:
10 January 2025
Online ISBN:
9780191905100
Print ISBN:
9780198868620
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Through a unique blend of the personal and historiographical, Charity after Augustine is an exploration of why the Augustinian tradition’s attempts to build solidarity or social cohesion in the societies of the Latin West have ended in disaster just as often as they have brought about justice. The conceit at the heart of the book is that the concrete practices of love or charity—almsgiving, works of mercy, good works—can tell us much about how religious leaders attempted to bind and hold communities together while also, in fits and starts with some startling reversions, attempting to expand the community and incorporate others. The first part probes the ways Augustine’s understanding of love is put into practice and how this understanding informs a tradition of political action inspired by Christian concepts of love and enacted through practices of charity. In a second, more expansive part, the book turns to the ways in which the Benedictine tradition as illustrated by Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux receives this vision, invigorates it with new visions of care and leadership, and puts it into practice in radically different contexts from those of Augustine’s age. At the heart of Charity after Augustine is an attempt to find a non-idealized vision of love that can inform thick, meaningful relations within a community that are not diluted by the inclusion of others

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