On the Road with Saint Augustine

My review of James K. A. Smith’s “On the Road with Augustine”.


Goals of the book:
Perhaps one of the most well known works of the early Church is Augustine’s Confessions. This book is an intensely personal look inside the life of Augustine as he writes a spiritual autobiography about life before Christ, life with Christ, and growing in Christ. At times, the book penetrates the soul as Augustine describes the depth of the human condition; at other times, Augustine offers genuine joy as he elucidates what life in Christ looks like. Either way, the book is a fascinating case study in what it means to be a Christian.

James J. A. Smith, a professor at Calvin College, is the perfect person to write a book about Augustine and Christian formation. Especially recently, Smith’s views on formative practices have become extremely popular. (For examples, see my review of The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.) Smith’s books, such as Desiring the Kingdom and You Are What You Love, are stunning and erudite explorations of what forms us and how we are formed. On the Road with Saint Augustine takes a slightly different approach, leading the reader down a similar path to Augustine’s as we grow in Christlikeness.

What does this book offer the Church?:
This book offers the church a unique chance to explore, both conceptually and in lived experience, Christian formation. Most people would love the chance to grow and live introspective lives like Augustine, and now we have the chance. This book is immensely practical, so readers who may have been intimidated by Smith’s previous works, or found it to be too conceptual at times, will find a lot to like here and a lot to learn from.

This book also offers the church a unique take on Saint Augustine. Augustine is a controversial figure today (not like he hasn’t been for all of church history, though), between critiques of original sin and discussions on race, for example. Many in the church have not engaged with Augustine much, so this serves as a good introduction to both Augustine and the Confessions.

How successfully does this book meet its goals?:
Double-dipping a bit into the last section, I want to re-iterate Smith’s success in exploring and explaining Saint Augustine. I never found the material too hard to understand (despite how little of Augustine I have read, ever), nor did I find it to be too “dumbed down” for the reader. But more importantly, I was struck by how much I wanted to change in my life in response to reading this. Even though I am an introvert, I always want to grow in how I evaluate my own life theologically. This book gives us wonderful tools to do so.

You can read more about the book at Baker Publishing Group’s website. You can pre-order this book ahead of its October 1 release date on Amazon.

"On the Road with Saint Augustine" by James K.A. Smith feels like a dip into philosophy and religious thought, but with an author who really wants to help the reader make a personal connection with Saint Augustine. I appreciated his angle and premise for this book, and for the conversational, coffee-shop vibe of his writing. I've always been intrigued by Saint Augustine but felt like I didn't know enough about him to truly appreciate his journey, and this book helps bridge that gap.

That being said, it is not a quick read. The author tries to write in such a way that the subject matter is personable, avoiding the dry state that writings on philosophy and religious thought often end up. He does a great job at this, but there is a lot to take in, and it will take a while to absorb. Know that you may find yourself pausing for reflection at various points throughout the book. That's a great thing, but just know that the content is very "meaty!" It's thought-provoking and deep.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for providing an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review.

On The Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts by James K. A. Smith takes us on the spiritual journey of Augustine, as he travels Africa and Italy searching for purpose and meaning. Smith hones in on the human heart’s longing for road trips—journeys. Our hearts long for something that leads us out on the road. Usually, those journeys lead to some destination, the events along the way often more important than the destination itself, but then we go back home. However, our true spiritual journey is to a home we’ve yet to see. We all start as prodigals, and the question is do we finally run home to the Father. On the Road with Saint Augustine lets us ride along on both Augustine’s and Smith’s journeys.

Smith writes in the introduction:

This is not a biography. This is not a book about Augustine. In a way, it’s a book Augustine has written about yo. It’s a journey with Augustine as a journey into oneself. It’s a travelogue of the heart. It’s a road trip with a prodigal who’s already been where you think you need to go.

I admit I’m a sucker for stories about journeys. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was my favorite as a kid. That being said, Smith’s writing is engaging and Augustine’s journey is engrossing. I never thought I’d say this about a book focused on an early church father and philosophy, but it’s a page-turner. I didn’t want to stop reading.

On The Road With Saint Augustine is so engaging because Smith emphasizes that the saint knows exactly what we’re going through as we fight the pull of the world to find true meaning. Smith writes:

He only knows you because he’s been there, because he has a sense of the solidarity of the human race in our foibles and frustrations and failed pursuits. If he jackhammers his way into the secret corners of our hearts, unearthing our hungers and fears, it’s only because it’s familiar territory: he’s seen it all in his own soul.

Smith walks us through Augustine’s insights into finding oneself, friendship, sex, ambition, family, justice, and death— all of it just as relevant today for wanderers as it was in the 4th century. Smith throws in ample philosophy; with Camus, Derrida, Heidegger and more. My personal favorite is his discussion around the existentialists and Augustine.

I really enjoyed On The Road With Saint Augustine. It’s an insightful journey you won’t regret.

This book is like a tour guide that takes us to the deep valleys of the Augustinian treasures. We live in the world that often latches on to simplistic approaches. In such a background, James K. A Smith, who himself is marinated with Augustinian theology, helps us journey with Augustine as pilgrims to a spirituality that is simple but not simplistic, intricate but without being boring, complex but not 'misunderstandable'

Smith shows us that Augustine is an experienced restless heart who can help modern restless hearts to make sense of this complex life. The author contends that Augustine understands our situation better than us and he has much to offer. Augustine speaks to our deepest needs, doubts, scepticism, failures, friendship, freedom, death, ambition and sex among other things. In short, Smith sees that Augustine's wisdom is desperately needed and applicable to our restless hearts.

I commend this book to you. It's worthy of your attention.

James K.A. Smith's new book on Augustine is not just helpful, it isn't just needful, it is beautiful, and it is healing. In typical Smithian fashion, we are introduced to some sort of modern and well known story and piece of pop culture and find Kerouac's 'On the Road' to be our starting point. Smith reminds us of the common hunger we all seem to have for The Road, for the journey of life, but how in that we have seemingly forgotten about a destination and find ourselves more focused on the journey itself and the stops and sights on the way. There is no idea of home, just the path we travel until we drop somewhere along it. Its here that we're taken back in time to find an African saint, Augustine, who found himself in the same position on The Road that we often find ourselves today. Restless. Homesick. Frustrated. Uneasy. A life that is filled with consumption of all sorts of new and marvelous things that don't seem to quench any sort of thirst. What in the world do we have in common with the life of a North African 1600 years in the past? Apparently a lot.

Smith masterfully takes the writings of Augustine and weaves them together to form an introduction to life, touching on our own feelings as a refugee searching for a home in this world, our desire for freedom, the pulse of ambition in our hearts, the desire for sex and intimacy, our relationships with our mothers and our fathers, a need for friendship, a search for enlightenment, a thirst for justice, how we learn to live through learning how to die, and a desperate need to find ourselves in the overall story of this existence.

But this is not a biography. It isn't even history. Smith does not write this to make Augustine a saint, nor a hero. I'm not even really convinced that his goal is to make Augustine a pastor. More than anything Smith makes Augustine into your friend. In reading this book Augustine has become someone who isn't trying to school me on theology as much as he is someone who wants to share how God has shaped his life. Augustine isn't someone that wants to solve all of my problems (he admittedly has enough of his own to deal with), but someone laughs and jumps with me in times of blessings, and who sits beside me in times of grief and simply says "It's okay man, I've been struggling with that myself" with his arm on my shoulder.

I can't think of any low points in this book, though there were certainly some high points that hit me where I needed to be poked. Smith's chapters on ambition and sex both pushed me hard to ask the questions "Why do I do what I do? Why do I want what I want? Where does my contentment really originate from?" In his chapter on justice I was challenged to face evil in a better way, not looking for answers, but being comforted in God's overcoming and absorbing evil. Worst of all, Smith left me silently sobbing in a coffee shop as I read through the chapter on fathers. As a father myself with plenty of my own daddy issues, Smith gracefully brought me before Augustine who reopened the wounds, but did so to provide better treatment and healing than I had before.

Without a doubt this book is a necessary one as we all could benefit from friendship with a 1600 year old North African.

This book was provided to me by Netgalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Some books offer you new language for old conundrums or simply a different perspective to analyse a particular issue. These are good things, but it doesn’t come close to the way James K. A. Smith’s work has operated in my life. I have to say, I’m partial. His work for me has been foundational … and all this time he was writing, thinking, living out of the spirit of Augustine.

This is no less true in his recently released, On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts where he shows with a lucidly only he can display that Augustine, far from being out-dated, is our contemporary in our age of authenticity even as we mine hopelessly for fool’s gold.

But if the road has beat you down; if the sights have become predictable and tired, and there are nights that you look at your friends in the car and wonder, “What the hell are we doing? Please just let me out”; if you’re weary from the chase, broken by the journey, tired of disappointment, unsettled by a sense that you’d like to find some rest not in accomplishment but in welcome, then Augustine might be the stranger you could travel with for a while.

James K. A. Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, 2019.
From sex, to motherhood, to idolatry, to love … Smith guides us through Augustine’s thought, without being afraid to criticise his mentor, to help us understand the cross-pressure we experience on the road. I couldn’t recommend this work highly enough … tolle lege!

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

by James K. A. Smith

Baker Academic & Brazos Press

Brazos Press

Christian , Religion & Spirituality

Pub Date 01 Oct 2019

I am reviewing a copy of On the Road With Saint Augustine through Baker Academic & Brazos Press and Netgalley:

This is not a book about Saint Augustine but what it is in a way is a book that Augustine wrote for each of us.

This book Following Smith’s Successful You Are What You Love shows us how Augustine can be a Spiritual Guide to us in 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 having done so 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.

If you are looking for a book that will help you to grow in faith and to find your way, then On the Road With Saint Augustine five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

“On the Road with Saint Augustine” will be the most insightful book you read all year. There are plenty of works on Augustine, but this one goes beyond dissecting purely theological issues. Smith uses Augustine as a guide for our postmodern culture. The desires, dissatisfaction, and anguish we feel are the same ones that Augustine battled over 1500 years ago. Have you ever wanted something so badly, but upon achieving it, still felt empty and unfulfilled? Then this book is for you. Do you feel lost and not sure where to turn? Then pick up and read.

Smith involves much of his own philosophical journey and the role Saint Augustine has played for him in various ways throughout the book. Likewise, readers will find this Early Church Father a welcome guide in a foreign land, showing us the path he has trod and helping us learn from his mistakes. At times one will feel that Smith is writing of their own life and not Saint Augustine’s but don’t fret - it only feels that way because Saint Augustine has something to tell our 21st century. Please, listen to the ancient wisdom Saint Augustine has to offer.

This book will provide laughs and tears, as well as prod deeper discussions and pondering to how one lives life. And for whom one lives life.

On the Road With Saint Augustine is written by philosopher, theologian, and author James K. A. Smith is the first book of his that I am aware of that is not written for a purely academic audience. And while this newest book is accessible to a broader audience, it is a little challenging in places. This is due mostly to the author's frequent mention of philosophers and an assumption of some familiarity with them and their views.

But with that small caveat out of the way, let me say that this book is wonderfully written, and I found myself often contemplating some of the points that Smith throughout the book. Smith melds the idea of a "road trip" to "find oneself," which many readers would be familiar with from novels from folks like Jack Kerouac, and even modern movies like Harold and Maude and Thelma and Louise, with the spiritual journey of Augustine.

Christian readers should mostly be familiar with the man Augustine and his importance. Still, probably many (like myself!) have found it hard to get through his books, The Confessions and The City of God. So, this book serves as a creative and impressive introduction to the life and writings of Augustine. Smith's goal in the book is to show how Augustine was not just a "saint" and a theologian who largely shaped Christianity in the West through his epochal writings. Augustine was a man like many people in our world today --- seeking out meaning and happiness in all the things the world has to offer but always coming away empty-ended. But for those of us who follow Christ, we find --- along with Augustine --- that He alone provides the meaning and value to life that we have been seeking all of our lives. After all, it is Augustine who wrote the famous line: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in You."

Smith takes essential topics and life issues, like freedom, ambition, sex, friendship, mothers and fathers, and enlightenment, and shows us how to navigate through these things spiritually --- just like Augustine. We moderns often turn up our noses at those who live in earlier times, thinking that they have no real application to our lives today. But through his mastery of Augustine's life and writings, and Smith's impactful way with words, he shows that we in 2019 are no different in the things that really matter from those who lived almost 1500 years ago.

On the Road With Saint Augustine is a book that readers may want to return to regularly, to spark deep thinking and a greater appreciation that our spiritual journeys are challenging, but at the same time, very similar. And in the end, our journeys will be found to be well worth the rocky roads that have been walked upon to reach our true goal --- Jesus Himself.

Smith writes, “Conversion doesn’t pluck you off the road; it just changes how you travel.” (15) Drawing on the ubiquitous yet apt literary metaphor of the road, the book traces key themes in Augustine’s writings which spark course correction, provoke reflection, introduce new tensions and resolve others. Each theme is held up to the light of Augustine, and slowly rotated, to reveal various cultural and religious imperfections in our notions of things such as freedom, ambition, friendship, and justice. Ambition, for instance, is often demonized in religious circles and lionized from secular perspectives, but Smith suggests a way to be ambitious from a place of inner rest, rest that comes from God. He writes, “Resting in the love of God doesn’t squelch ambition; it fuels it with a different fire (91).” Taking up the topic of freedom, he urges us to consider not just what we can be free from but what we are freed for—a distinction worth serious consideration in an age obsessed with individual liberty. More earthy matters are also taken up, such as mothers and fathers, which foster surprising empathy and understanding for mothers and inspiring challenges for fathers. Yet, the reader is not left alone to implement all insight; the book repeatedly pledges a persistent grace which revolutionizes our will and our wants—the very presence of God with us in every twist and turn of the road.

"On the Road with Saint Augustine" by James K.A. Smith is not going to be a quick read for some of us. I don't even think it's supposed to be a quick read; it's an invitation to a journey.

The walking partner, rather, fellow pilgrim is that father-of-the-church-of-old, St Augustine. Rather than a mere autobiography or reflection on the life of Augustine, Smith seeks to weave the wisdom of Augustine with the modern pilgrim, and introduce both as fellows.

At times I found myself slowing right down and pondering paragraphs, pages even. What we find is, Augustine makes a reliable friend and fellow pilgrim. In an age of angst, worry, restlessness, Augustine has a lot to 'offer' for a younger generation seeking to find their way.

Smith has written a very engaging book and one well worth interacting with.

**I received a free e-copy of this book in return for honest feedback. I was not obliged to offer positive responses.

On the Road with Saint Augustine by James K. A. Smith is a brilliant work. It's hard to describe this book because it is so unlike any other book. It's part Augustine biography, part memoir, and a treatise on spirituality. But put that aside, I love how this book reads and think it is an important book for everyone to read. I think seasoned believers will get so much from this book. I also think that those who have rejected the Gospel will get a lot from this book. I highly recommend it. I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher with no obligations. These opinions are entirely my own.

I have long enjoyed James K.A. Smith's work and was thrilled to see this addition to his writing. He strikes a good balance between academic and personal in this book, which is helpful as someone who enjoys both sides of a theological discussion. Recommended for theology buffs and for anyone who is looking to get to know Augustinian philosophy and theology in a more practical way.

I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting when I picked this book up, but it wasn't a fascinating exploration of life and faith as a journey seen through the lens of the writings, letters, and sermons of Saint Augustine compared and contrasted with his philosophical descendants, the 20th century existentialists. Smith explores Augustine's perspective on our deepest needs and longings, our experiences of the best and worst life has to offer, and how so much of his insight is just as applicable in the 21st century as it was when he wrote it 1600 years ago. This is thought-provoking, clarifying, and not infrequently challenging book that's well worth the time and effort of the wrestling it leads to.