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"Peter Iver Kaufman shows that, although Giorgio Agamben represents Augustine as an admired pioneer of an alternative form of life, he also considers Augustine an obstacle keeping readers from discovering their potential. Kaufman develops a compelling, radical alternative to progressive politics by continuing the line of thought he introduced in On Agamben, Arendt, Christianity, and the Dark Arts of Civilization. Kaufman starts with a comparison of Agamben and Augustine's projects, both of which challenge reigning concepts of citizenship. He argues that Agamben, troubled by Augustine's opposition to Donatists and Pelagians, failed to forge links between his own redefinitions of authenticity and "the coming community" and the bishop's understandings of grace, community, and compassion. On Agamben, Donatism, Pelagianism, and the Missing Links sheds new light on Augustine's "political theology," introducing ways it can be used as a resource for alternative polities while supplementing Agamben's scholarship and scholarship on Agamben"--

Peter Iver Kaufman explores how various Christian leaders throughout history have used forms of ""political theology"" to merge the romance of conquest and empire with hopes for political and religious redemption. His discussion covers such figures as Constantine, Augustine, Charlemagne, Pope Gregory VII, Dante, Zwingli, Calvin, and Cromwell. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperbac

Peter Iver Kaufman explores how various Christian leaders throughout history have used forms of ""political theology"" to merge the romance of conquest and empire with hopes for political and religious redemption. His discussion covers such figures as Constantine, Augustine, Charlemagne, Pope Gregory VII, Dante, Zwingli, Calvin, and Cromwell. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperbac

Introduction -- Augustine, Ambrose, and ambition -- Limitations -- Using government : Augustine and the Donatists -- Used but not improved : Augustine's city of God -- Thomas More : at work in the world -- More -- Crisis -- Conclusion

Beginning in 1970 and continuing for forty years thereafter, Robert Markus informed and enlivened discussions of Constantinian Christianity. His impressive erudition still illumines our understanding of the period "during which Christian Romans came slowly to identify themselves with traditional Roman values, culture, practices, and established institutions." Markus identifies the world in which that assimilation slowly occurred as "the secular." Accustomed to hearing about assimilation of that sort when conversations turn to Christianity's affirmations of—or accommodations to— democratic structures or, more pointedly, to civil religion, we may consider Markus politically correct. Yet because he conscripted Latin Christianity's prolific paladin, Augustine of Hippo, into the service of the secular, as it were, Markus invites us to question whether he was, on that count, historically correct.

To assist colleagues from other disciplines who teach Augustine's texts in their core courses, this contribution to the Lilly Colloquium discusses Augustine's assessments of Emperors Constantine and Theodosius. His presentations of their tenure in office and their virtues suggest that his position on political leadership corresponds with his general skepticism about political platforms and platitudes. Yet careful reading of his revision of Ambrose's account of Emperor Theodosius's public penance and reconsideration of the last five sections of his fifth book City of God—as well as a reappraisal of several of his sermons on the Psalms—suggest that he proposes a radical alternative to political conformity relevant to undergraduates' conventional expectations of society's progress and their parts in it.

Bringing together contributions from political, cultural, and literary historians, Leadership and Elizabethan Culture identifies distinctive problems confronting early modern English government during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. This diverse group of contributors examines local elites and church leadership, explores the queen, her councillors, as well as her struggles with Mary Stuart and Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, raises questions about Elizabeth's leadership, and the advice she received as well as the advice she rejected. Selected, influential works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Sidney, and Bacon are put in their Elizabethan and contemporary critical contexts, rounding off the study of Elizabethan culture and projecting forward to the images of leadership that form a conspicuous part of the Elizabethan legacy. ; https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1050/thumbnail.jpg

In 1576, after Edmund Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, presumed to lecture Queen Elizabeth on the importance of preaching and on her duty to listen to such lectures, his influence diminished precipitously, and leadership of the established English church fell to Bishop Aylmer. Grindal's friends on the queen's Privy Council, "forward" Calvinists (or ultra-Protestants), were powerless to save him from the consequences of his indiscretion, which damaged the ultras' other initiatives' chances of success. This paper concerns one of those initiatives. From the late 1560s, they urged their queen "actively" to intervene in the Dutch wars. They collaborated with Calvinists on the Continent who befriended Prince William of Orange and who hoped to help him hold together a coalition of religiously reformed and Roman Catholic insurgents in the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries. The English ultra-Protestants would have their government send money, munitions, and men in arms to the Netherlands, to tip the balance against viceroys sent by King Philip II of Spain. Grindal's setback undermined the English Calvinists' efforts to form an Anglo-Dutch alliance which, they assumed, would boost the prospects for an international Protestant league. Yet Elizabeth did assist the Dutch as they wrestled with decisions forced on them by developments in the Netherlands during the 1570s, and she did so more consistently and more cleverly than many historians of Tudor diplomacy have thought. Two competing assessments determine the way questions are formulated in the study of the queen's and regime's Dutch diplomacy. The general consensus is that she was indecisive and inconsistent. Paul Hammer characterizes Elizabeth's responses to the crises in the Low Countries as a "zigzag of different" ("even contradictory") maneuvers. Wallace McCaffrey and R. B. Wernham agree that England's "hesitations and gyrations" do not pass as coherent, creditable policy. Charles Wilson scolds Elizabeth for being timid and tepid--incapable of enthusiasm for "a great cause." But David J.B. Trim's striking counterthrust depicts the queen's overtures to Netherlanders as part of her courageous – and "confessionally driven" – foreign policy; Trim replaces "hesitation" and "zigzag" with a coherent "Protestant programme of action prioritized by the Elizabethan government" with the aim of improving prospects for "Calvinist internationalism." What follows is an alternative to all these characterizations, one that, as noted, finds evidence for greater consistency and coherence in Elizabeth's leadership and less confessional "drive." That she would have been uneasy around religious extremists ought not to astonish us; her father's, step-brother's, and step-sister's reigns as well as the start of her own were disturbed by zealous subjects, who were bent on shoring up or dismantling the realm's religious settlements.

By discussing several of the issues that complicated the Christian's cohabitation and political participation in "this wicked world," as Augustine saw them, the remainder of this contribution will garrison the ground we have gained collecting the bad news he conveyed in his city. We shall inquire whether the assorted "consolations" he enumerated compensated for the corruption. And we shall consider one reason he might have had for composing his tome as a massive disorienting device. Of course, certainty about authorial intent is impossible to pocket, yet one can make the case that Augustine dropped City of God into the post-410 conversation about empires, conquest, glory, and cupidity to put such ephemera in perspective. Might he have wanted to give pause to colleagues who too readily acquiesced in the hot pursuit of trifles in their terrestrial cities? Before attempting to answer, we ought to ask if "dystopia" is the right term to characterize Augustine's city where trifles and the desire to possess them dominated the practice of politics - a city of gaud - or, to be precise, to characterize his depiction of his terribly flawed and "wicked world."

John Craig's essay in this volume reports from the parishes that custom, law and zeal brought most Elizabethans to church. Hence, the laity learned about the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, despite preachers' complaints that parishioners slept through sermons. But not all late Tudor Christians were satisfied with what they learned. Catholics who came to avoid the fines assessed on absentees were no doubt diffident. Historians refer to them now as 'church papists' to distinguish them from Catholics who stayed away. And along with the drowsy and dutifully yet grudgingly present, there were others - in the pulpits as well as the pews - who were discontented with the religious settlement. They argued that more ought to be done to bring the English church - its liturgy and discipline - into line with churches on the Continent that they considered to be more competently and completely reformed. Percival Wiburn, who had visited several of those churches in the 1560s, shortly after having been suspended form his ministry for refusing to wear prescribed vestments, was among this last set of malcontents for a spell. And when the government pressed bishops in 1576 to suppress the public preaching called prophesyings, which he outspokenly advocated in Northamptonshire, Wiburn was further aggrieved. Nonetheless, in 1581, he professed that he was happy he lived and preached in a 'gospelling state'.

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, winner of the prestigious 2009 Booker-Man award for fiction, re-presents the 1520s and early 1530s from Thomas Cromwell's perspective. Mantel mistakenly underscores Cromwell's confessional neutrality and imagines his kindness as well as Thomas More's alleged cruelty. The book recycles old and threadbare accusations that More himself answered. "Dis-Manteling" collects evidence for the accuracy of More's answers and supplies alternative explanations for events and for More's attitudes that Mantel packs into her accusations. Wolf Hall is admirably readable, although prejudicial. Perhaps it is fair for fiction to distort so ascertainably, yet I should think that historians will want to have a dissent on the record.

Surely there is enough kindling lying about in the Bible and in subsequent moral theology to fire up love for neighbors and compassion for countless "friends" in foreign parts--and in crisis. And, surely, the momentum of love's labor for the just redistribution of resources, fueled by activists' appeals for solidarity, should be sustained by stressing that we are creatures made for affection, not for aggression. Yet experience, plus the history of the Christian traditions, taught Reinhold Niebuhr, who memorably reminded Christian realists, how often love was "defeated," how a "strategy of brotherhood . . . degenerates from mutuality to a prudent regard for the interests of self and from an impulse towards community to an acceptance of the survival impulse as ethically normative" (Niebuhr 1964, 2:96). But he was encouraged after reading Augustine. The late antique African bishop nudged Niebuhr to look for the "formula for leavening the city of this world with the love of the city of God" (Niebuhr 1953, 134). The authors of the books before us are still looking. They concede, as did Niebuhr, that Augustine's monumental City of God explicitly sets limits on love's effectiveness on the practice of politics. They refuse, nonetheless, as did Niebuhr, to offer any "blanket judgments about the power of the state," although they acknowledge that politics tends to trick practitioners to overlook limits and to become "idolatrous[ly]" infatuated with what governments can do (Lovin 1995, 180-84; Lovin 2008, 198-99).