Bloomsbury Academic On Agamben, Arendt, Christianity, and the Dark Arts of Civilization (Reading Augustine)

About the Author Peter Iver Kaufman is Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, USA. Product Description Progressives have found passages that suggest Augustine might have entertained hopes for meaningful political melioration in his time and that could make his political theology an especially valuable source for an ethics of democratic citizenship and for hopeful citizenship in ours. Peter Iver Kaufman argues that his sentiments may more compellingly offer a radical alternative to prevailing progressive politics. Exploring Augustines roughly contemporary experiments with the political culture, the book examines Georgio Agambens disenchantments and alternatives alongside those of Augustine, comparing the formers fascination with the refugees, as opposed to citizens who embrace forms of life promoted by political protocols. Kaufman then chronicles Hannah Arendts criticism of the alternative model and her preferences for and commitments to more direct political engagement. Review "Peter Kaufman is one of our most venerable interpreters of Augustine's political thought. In this creative volume, he continues his quarrel with Augustine's optimists through a series of illuminating and provocative forays into Agamben and Arendt. Kaufman's communitarian alternative may be the antidote we need for these cynical and lonely times." --Gregory W. Lee, Associate Professor of Theology and Urban Studies, Wheaton College, USA"In a creative juxtaposition that leverages Augustine's political theology for both modern and postmodern critiques of citizenship and sovereignty, Kaufman has managed to locate in the early Christian monastic movement some paradigms of countercultural identity formation in the figure of the practicing Christian who lives as a pilgrim, exile, and "other." Augustine is here interpreted as a theologian whose early, short-lived fantasy of an alternative community at Cassiacum left an indelible imprint on his imagination, even as he became a central figure in the shaping and definition of what Christian "conformity" should look like. This is a study that will challenge many assumptions of patristic scholars, one that recuperates Augustine as a thinker who can be placed in a critical tradition of resistance and non-conformity." --W. Scott Blanchard, Professor of English, Misericordia University, USA