What does St. Augustine have to say to post-modern culture?
             I think that the most vital aspect in Augustine's Confessions, more specifically his books "Student at Carthage" and "The birth-pangs of Conversion", is the concept of True Love. Augustine tells us that love is paradoxically balanced between reason and passion, as both reason and passion can be both good and evil at some time or another. So it is not necessarily an equilibrium. The whole idea that love has to be right or wrong, hot or cold, or good or evil is cultivated in a very Western thought process. Eastern thought uses the analogy of a circle to explain thought or argument. There is no need to balance on pointy edges to "weigh" the pros and cons. There are no sides in a circle, and its' focus is interminably the center of the circle, which gains strength from the entire circumfrence. To apply the anaolgy, Christ is the center, along with Faith and Truth. All three are in and of themselves, love, by definition. Christ is Love in humanity, Faith is Love in spirit, and Truth is Love surrounding an omnipotent creator. These are absolutes.
             "I AM the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End", claims Jesus. How can this be possible, we ask. God is the Ultimate Paradox, the True Mystery. This was the ending statement of Dante when he reached the highest heaven; no words can ever capture the essence of the Creator. "I AM" is a powerful statement in and of itself. Jesus is staking claims on the name YHWH, which cannot be uttered by the lips of his followers, but can be known only in a spirit of praxis, of action. Yahweh continuously "IS" and "IS" involved in the everyday lives of his people.
             Good and evil, masculine and feminine, are all tired dialectics that make us wonder whether or not there's more to it than the black and white. Thia rhetoric begins to bore us, as we think of plausible, however more complex, answers. All of these dyads are tied in the human...