The Irrational Augustine takes the notion of St Augustine as rigid and dogmatic Father of the Church and turns it on its head. Catherine Conybeare reads Augustine's earliest works to discover the anti-dogmatic Augustine, who values changeability and human interconnectedness and deplores social exclusion. The novelty of her book lies in taking seriously the nature of these early works as performances, through which multiple questions can be raised and multiple options explored, both in words and through their dramatic framework. The theological consequences are considerable. A very human...

This literate and accessible study examines the profound impact Paulinus had on Christian thought during a crucial period of its development. The letters of Paulinus and his correspondents portray an early Christian 'web' of shared concepts, intellectual discussion, and group development. Catherine Conybeare examines how the very process of writing and transmitting letters between members of a community helped to bind that community together and to aid the creation of ideas which would continue to reverberate for centuries. Paulinus was key to that group iconic as a model of behavior, as a...

The laughter of delight has gone unheard in the Western tradition. This work brings new light to the notion, and has a consistent leitmotif: the delighted laughter of the matriarch Sarah in the book of Genesis, when she gives birth to her son Isaac. This laughter is "heard" through biblical commentaries and twentieth-century theorists of laughter.