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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
(Dis)Owning Constantinian Christianity, Peter Iver Kaufman
(Dis)Owning Constantinian Christianity, Peter Iver Kaufman
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
From 1970 until he took leave of the terrestrial city over forty years later, Robert Markus informed and enlivened our discussions of Constantinian Christianity. His impressive erudition still does. He was especially and insightfully concerned with the period “during which Christian Romans came slowly to identify themselves with traditional Roman values, culture, practices, and established institutions.” And he identified the world in which that assimilation “slowly” occurred as “the secular.” His readers were used to that assimilation in their time--our time--having heard references to civil religion, so Markus could well have been considered to be politically correct, and a number …
Augustine's Dystopia, Peter Iver Kaufman
Augustine's Dystopia, Peter Iver Kaufman
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
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 …
Augustine And Corruption, Peter Iver Kaufman
Augustine And Corruption, Peter Iver Kaufman
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
Augustine's political thought or, as it is often called, political theology is a matter of considerable dispute. 'Augustine and Corruption' approaches that dispute by examining the evidence that Ramsay MacMullen presented to substantiate his observation that Augustine 'approved of' corruption. I read that evidence differently and use Augustine's remarks about bribes paid to court clerks, schemes to defraud philanthropists, and tax evasion to support what has been aptly called 'a minimalist' interpretation of his political expectations.
Patience And/Or Politics: Augustine And The Crisis At Calama, 408-409, Peter Iver Kaufman
Patience And/Or Politics: Augustine And The Crisis At Calama, 408-409, Peter Iver Kaufman
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
Few scholars would quarrel with Ernst Dassman's observation that early Christian "reserve" toward the political cultures of antiquity--a mixture of difference and indifference, which only occasionally gave way to hostility--turned Christians' outcast status into something of a virtue.Still fewer are likely to dispute the assertion that influential fourth-century Christians unreservedly welcomed the changes that came with Constantine and anticipated the "Christianization" of imperial, if not also local, politics. But evaluations of Augustine's enthusiasm later that century and early the next never fail now to elicit disagreement