Humans are lovers, and yet a good deal of pedagogical theory, Christian or otherwise, assumes an anthropology at odds with human nature, fixed in a model of humans as "thinking things." Turning to Augustine, this book provides a normative vision for Christian higher education. A phenomenological reappropriation of human subjectivity reveals an authentic order to love, even when damaged by sin, and loves, made authentic by grace, allow the intellectually, morally, and religiously converted person to attain an integral unity. Properly understanding the integral relation between love and the...

While the term acedia may be unfamiliar, the vice, usually translated as sloth, is all too common. Sloth is not mere laziness, however, but a disgust with reality, a loathing of our call to be friends with God, and a spiteful hatred of place and life itself. As described by Josef Pieper, the slothful person does not "want to be as God wants him to be, and that ultimately means he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally is." Sloth is a hellish despair.

Our own culture is deeply infected, choosing a destructive freedom rather than the good work for which God created us. Acedia and...

This volume asks how and why the concept of nature has changed its meaning in modernity and whether a rearticulation of premodern ideas about nature is possible. Building on the work of Voegelin, Strauss, Lonergan, Finnis, and others, the book compares and contrasts classical, medieval, and modern conceptions of nature.