August

In August Helm’s Deep will begin a short series, ‘St. Augustine’s Books’. Readers of the Confessions have long puzzled over the structure of the work, particularly the relation between the autobiographical Books I – IX and the focussed discussions on memory, time and creation, and Genesis I, of Books X - XIII. One of the ways of thinking about the autobiographical books is to see them as structured by three separate episodes in which Augustine reads works of pagan philosophy, and the varied, mainly positive impact that they had on him. He certainly thought that they had come his way by the providence of God. We shall consider these three episodes in turn.

The post on John Piper’s Christian hedonism and its relation to Jonathan Edwards’s view of emotion of a couple of weeks ago aroused quite a bit of interest. So in August Helm’s Deep is also offering ‘Further thoughts on John Piper’s Christian Hedonism’.

So, Augustine and also John Piper.