Book: Making Room for Others: Augustine and the contemporary world

Making Room for Others: Augustine and the contemporary world,
by Paul Graham OSA, St Pauls Publishing - £8.99

These reflections on religion and society take as their starting point the insights of Augustine of Hippo (356-430), whose own end of times were not unlike our own. As it says in the Preface, ‘Augustine is a strikingly appropriate figure for the times that we live in. We seem to be at the “end of” everything: “the end of modernity”, “the end of history”, “the end of philosophy”, “the end of capitalism”, perhaps even the end of a particular way of living the Christian life, especially in countries where Christianity was the norm. Augustine, too, lived at the end of the Roman Empire: the old certainties were crumbling and the new had yet to be born.’

As well as pointing out the relevance of Augustine for today, these reflections range widely to include the Christian life today, lay and religious; the persistence of religion in a secularised world; and faith as a shared and collective search for God. This book is a helpful corrective to the mistaken notion that the search for God is an isolated one. It underlines the profoundly communal character of religious experience as the ‘redemption of solitude’, to use a challenging phrase from the writings of Jonathan Sacks.

In the end, as Graham points out, Christianity comes down to ‘making room for others’, or, in the words of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the Christian life ‘is linked to a lived union with a “people”, and for each individual it can only be attained with this 'we'. This is a timely book and worth the effort for those who wish to deepen their understanding of Christianity and the world we live in today.

Fr Paul Graham, OSA, is an Augustinian friar and parish priest of St Monica's, Hoxton, London. He is also the recently re-elected provinicial of the Augustinian friars of Great Britain.