The Way That Leads There: Augustinian Reflections on the Christian Life

St. Augustine formulated the classic Christian understanding of desire, that "our hearts are restless until they rest in God." Gilbert Meilaender maintains that this frustrated desire lies at the heart of our existence. In "The Way That Leads There", he takes Augustine as a "conversation partner" for exploring subjects that human beings have wrestled with for centuries - desire, duty, politics, sex, and grief. Deep and carefully reasoned, Meilaender's work rescues Augustine from many of our misperceptions and interacts meaningfully with both C. S. Lewis and Catholic moral theology, generating insights on difficult topics - lying, contraception, food, and grief, among others. The picture of life that emerges in these pages is one of incompleteness, of our inability to perfect and unify our moral lives. Yet, this inability is not a cause for despair; it is rather a call to look, with Augustine, to God as the source and object of our greatest desire.