August is for Augustine

This month is named after the emperor Augustus, but I’d rather think of it as a month for Augustine, the saintly theologian who died almost 1600 years ago.

Augustine’s City of God, 1300 or so pages in modern translations, is a lot to lug to a desk, so I recommend Gregory Lee’s The Essential City of God: A Reader and Commentary (Baker, 2025). Only 445 pages, including short essays about the classic, it helps us to absorb Augustine’s central theme: Christians should love the eternal over the temporal, and in doing so contribute to the peace of the earthly city.

The great thinker constructed the book as he went on, so it’s a cathedral with many side chapels in which tourists readily get lost. Lee helps us make it to the altar and absorb Augustine’s political and theological insights. For example, he wrote that even pagan Romans understood self-enriching in public office is wrong. He praised those who refrained from such temptation: “Quintus Cincinnatus, when he owned less than two acres of land and was tilling them with his own hands,” was given complete power during a crisis, and “after defeating the enemy and gaining untold glory, remained in exactly the same poverty.”

The theology is more important, and Augustine is acute in distinguishing Christian contentment with God’s decrees from infatuation with material pleasures or “lust for human praise,” one of Julius Caesar’s failings. Sixteen centuries later Andrew Root says the same in Evangelism in an Age of Despair: Hope Beyond the Failed Promise of Happiness (Baker, 2025). Root’s history lectures about Michel de Montaigne and others are enjoyable but include some clunky writing, such as use of the expression “immanent contentment” 39 times in seven pages. 

Matthew Bates minimizes theological differences in Beyond the Salvation Wars: Why Both Protestants and Catholics Must Reimagine How We Are Saved (Brazos, 2025). The title sounds like marketing or a line from Vizzini in The Princess Bride: “Ever hear of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Morons!” But Bates accurately reports what Augustine embraced: We have an inherited tendency to sin and our wills are in bondage, apart from God’s grace. Protestants and Catholics fight about that insight and debate -isms—monergism vs. Molinism—but the differences aren’t imaginary.

Augustine—from the Bible, from the babble he heard, and from the baubles people pursued on both sides of the Mediterranean—thought we are helpless. The Puritans thought only God’s grace brings Freedom From Sin’s Dominion, the title of John Owen’s book republished last month by Reformation Heritage Books. It’s part of a series of short books with evocative 17^th century titles like George Swinnock’s The Fading of the Flesh and the Flourishing of Faith.

“The fading of the flesh”—and lots of it—could also have been the subtitle of Mark Witton’s King Tyrant (Princeton University Press, 2025)—an authoritative book for adults about Tyrannosaurus rex, with drawings of fighting dinosaurs that make it perfect bedtime reading for seven-year-old boys and their grandparents. (Suggestion to the old: Summarize the well-written but lengthy descriptions.)

The massive dinosaurs typically died at 30, and the species died out after a meteor hit the Yucatán Peninsula. Other predators are still with us, as Shark: The Illustrated Biography, by Daniel Abel and Sophie Maycock (Princeton, 2025), shows. If you’ve ever wondered what birds do at night, Roger Pasquier’s Birds at Rest: The Behavior and Ecology of Avian Sleep (Princeton, 2025) is the book for you.

And if you’ve wondered what bones are buried in Rome’s leading book ossuary, Grzegorz Górny and Janusz Rosikoń’s Vatican Secret Archives: Unknown Pages of Church History (Ignatius, 2020) is for you. It contains valid indictments of the left’s murderous activities in the French Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, and interesting but thoroughly questionable defenses of the Inquisition, the trial of Galileo, and the silence of Pius XII in the face of the Holocaust.

In Brief

Iain MacGregor’s The Hiroshima Men (Scribner, 2025) describes the making of the first atomic bombs, how the Pacific War became increasingly costly in lives for both Japan and the United States, how the Japanese came close to committing national suicide, and how American leaders decided using atomic bombs was a type of mercy killing.

In Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy (Norton, 2025), Jeffrey Boutwell writes engagingly about his distant Civil War cousin George Boutwell, the senator and Secretary of the Treasury who was deeply influential and is now merely buried in footnotes.