On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

This is not a book about Saint Augustine. In a way, it's a book Augustine has written about each of us. Popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith has spent time on the road with Augustine, and he invites us to take this journey too, for this ancient African thinker knows far more about us than we might expect.

Following Smith's successful You Are What You Love, this book shows how Augustine can be a pilgrim guide to a spirituality that meets the complicated world we live in. Augustine, says Smith, is the patron saint of restless hearts--a guide who has been there, asked our questions, and knows our frustrations and failed pursuits. Augustine spent a lifetime searching for his heart's true home and he can help us find our way.

"What makes Augustine a guide worth considering," says Smith, "is that he knows where home is, where rest can be found, what peace feels like, even if it is sometimes ephemeral and elusive along the way."

Addressing believers and skeptics alike, this book shows how Augustine's timeless wisdom speaks to the worries and struggles of contemporary life, covering topics such as ambition, sex, friendship, freedom, parenthood, and death. As Smith vividly and colorfully brings Augustine to life for 21st-century readers, he also offers a fresh articulation of Christianity that speaks to our deepest hungers, fears, and hopes.

Contents

Introduction
Orientation
Heart on the Run
How to Hit the Road
Augustine Our Contemporary
How to Find Yourself
A Refugee Spirituality
How to Live Between
Detours on the Way to Myself
Freedom
How to Escape
Ambition
How to Aspire
Sex
How to Connect
Mothers
How to Be Dependent
Friendship
How to Belong
Enlightenment
How to Believe
Story
How to Be a Character
Justice
How to Protest
Fathers
How to Be Broken
Death
How to Hope
Homecoming
Index

"On the Road with Saint Augustine is a learned, large-hearted, and quite lively introduction to Augustine, or to life by way of Augustine, or to God by way of both. The variety of Smith's references is astonishing, as is the seamless way he moves among them. I expect many modern readers will find themselves--and, crucially, much more than themselves--in this book."

Christian Wiman, author of My Bright Abyss and Every Riven Thing