Augustine of Hippo

Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church: The Zondervan Debates
christianity

Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church: The Zondervan Debates

01/21/2026 Bruce Strom 3

For better or worse, most of us choose our intimate partners, and build our world around that choice. If a homosexual couple is accepted by the clergy of your church, what good can come from telling them they are going to burn in hell if they do not repent? We are only responsible for our own personal salvation, it is not our job, particularly if we are laymen, to speculate on whether our neighbor will be saved. That is between them and Jesus, and nobody else.
My goal is not to change your mind about homosexuality. My goal is: If you do not accept that it is possible to be both a Christian and homosexual, that you will refrain from telling them they are damned to burn in hell, but would instead refer them to an Episcopalian Church, or other church where they would be welcome.
Jesus will judge us all in front of the great IMAX theater in the sky, where we will need to account for the decisions we made in our lives as they are displayed on that screen forty feet wide and forty feet tall. Jesus is the judge; we should not seek to do his job. Instead, we work out our own salvation, judging our own actions rather than our neighbors’. […]

Plato’s Republic, Book 1, Reflecting on Old Age, Morality, and Justice
Aging

Plato’s Republic, Book 1, On Aging and Morality, a Better Word for Justice

12/27/2025 Bruce Strom 0

Reading Robin Waterfield’s translation was like breathing fresh alpine air. When I thought that Plato’s Republic was about justice, I reasoned that this was because Socrates sought to train Athenians to be better citizens in a direct democracy, a skill that would not be needed in the later totalitarian Roman Empire. But Robin Waterfield’s translation of the Republic makes more sense and is more in line with Stoic and Christian moral values. I demur from the conventional scholarly opinion that who the translator is does not matter. […]

Opposing Suicide: According to the Bible, Catholic Catechism, and St Augustine’s City of God
Command 6 Do Not Murder

Opposing Suicide: Biblical Exhortations, Catholic Catechism, and St Augustine’s City of God

12/12/2025 Bruce Strom 1

CCC 2281. “Suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life. It is gravely contrary to the just love of self. It likewise offends love of neighbor because it unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations. Suicide is contrary to love for the living God.” […]

Epictetus, Eminent Roman Stoic Philosopher, on Living Well, Dying Well, and Opposing Suicide
Aging

Epictetus, Eminent Roman Stoic Philosopher, on Living Well, Dying Well, and Opposing Suicide

10/11/2025 Bruce Strom 2

Is it wise to complain? Epictetus observes: “If someone dies young, he blames the gods because he is being taken before his time. If someone lingers on into extreme old age, he too blames the gods.” “Despite this, at the approach of death, he wants to stay alive; he sends for the doctors and begs him to do all he can.” “It is quite remarkable to see how people want neither to live nor to die.”
“Is health good and illness bad? No, man. What, then? Health managed well is good, but when badly managed, it is bad.”
Epictetus points out: “If you look at yourself in isolation, it is natural for you to live to an old age, to be rich, to be healthy. But if you look at yourself as a human being and as part of some whole, for the sake of that whole, it may be appropriate for you to be ill, or risk your life at sea, or be poor, or die young. Why get angry then?” “What is a human being? A part of a city made up of gods and human beings,” “a small copy of the universal city.” […]

Pope Leo the Great, Confronting Attila the Hun, and His Role in Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon
Catholic Middle Ages and Beyond

Pope Leo the Great, Confronting Attila the Hun, and His Role in the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon

10/05/2025 Bruce Strom 0

As Pope Benedict XVI writes: “The times in which Pope Leo lived were very difficult: constant barbarian invasions, the gradual weakening of imperial authority in the West, and the long, drawn-out social crisis forced the Bishop of Rome” “to play an important role in both civil and political events.”
“In a period of profound crisis, Leo the Great knew how to make himself close to the people and the faithful with his pastoral action and his preaching. He enlivened charity in a Rome tried by famines, an influx of refugees, injustice, and poverty. He opposed pagan superstitions and actions of Manichaean groups. He associated the liturgy with the daily life of Christians.” […]

Seneca on Aging Death and Suicide
Aging

Roman Stoic Philosopher Seneca on Aging, Death, and Suicide

09/17/2025 Bruce Strom 5

Seneca reminds us: “There is indeed a limit fixed to us,” “but none of us knows how near he is to this limit. Therefore, let us so order our minds as if we had come to the very end. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s account every day.” “Let us begin at once to live and count each separate day as a separate life.” What is important is “not how long you live, but how nobly you live. And often living nobly means that you cannot live long.” […]

Did Rome Fall, or Evolve to Barbarian Kingdoms? Sack of Rome, and Attila the Hun’s Invasions
Greek and Roman History

Did Rome Fall, or Evolve Into the Barbarian Kingdoms? Sacks of Rome, and Attila the Hun’s Invasions

09/15/2025 Bruce Strom 1

Peter Brown contends: “The Roman Empire was not violently breached by barbarian “invasions.” Rather, between AD 200 and 400, the frontier itself changed. From being a defensive region, which kept Romans and barbarians apart, it had become, instead, an extensive middle ground, in which roman and barbarian societies were drawn together. And after AD 400, it was the barbarians and no longer the Romans who became the dominant partners in the middle ground.” Indeed, after AD 400 barbarian tribes served in the army of the Huns, and barbarians from most of the tribes, including the Huns, served in the Roman armies. […]

Classical Christian Psychologist Paul Tournier on Old Age, Death, and Faith
Aging

Classical Christian Psychologist Paul Tournier on Old Age, Death, and Faith

08/26/2025 Bruce Strom 2

Tournier reminds us that we may experience many successes, but as we grow older, “success retreats, and escapes us, it is limited, unfulfilled.” “When one comes to the end, a man’s life is nothing much.” “Professional life is over, and it finishes unfinished. This is a prefiguration of death, in which the whole of life will finish it, too, being unfinished. That is the dramatic contradiction of death.” Quoting Robert Mehl: “An end, but not a fulfilment, that is the face of death.” […]

St Augustine’s On Christian Teaching and JD Vance, Order of Love
Politics

St Augustine’s On Christian Teaching and JD Vance, Order of Love

07/05/2025 Bruce Strom 0

St Augustine clearly teaches us: “All people should be loved equally. But you cannot do good to all people equally, so you should take particular thought for those who, as if by lot, happen to be particularly close to you in terms of place, time, or any other circumstances.”
St Augustine explains further: “Suppose you have plenty of something which had to be given to someone in need but could not be given to two people, and you met two people,” you could flip a coin for who would receive it. But if one of them was a relative, Jesus would not object if you benefited him. In other words, if your children are starving, you need not share what little food you have with strangers.
Should we love everyone, even our enemies? Definitely, Christians are exhorted to love their enemies. As St Augustine teaches us: “We do not fear our enemies, for they do not take away from us what we love, but we pity them, for they hate us all the more because they are separated from the one we love,” since they are separated from God. […]

St John Chrysostom, Voltaire, and Leibniz Ask: Why Would a Loving God Permit Earthquakes?
Early Church Writing

St John Chrysostom, Voltaire, and Leibniz Ask: Why Would a Loving God Permit Earthquakes?

04/18/2025 Bruce Strom 2

Theodicy is the term that Gottfried Leibniz coined in 1710 to describe this so-called problem of how an Almighty God permits suffering in the world.[1] The famed textual critic Bart Ehrman describes how he lost his faith over his concern about Theodicy in his book, On God’s Problem: Why We Suffer. As he points out, different books of the Bible answer this question differently. Many of the prophets, like St John Chrysostom, proclaim that natural disasters are often punishment meted out because we do not take care of the widows, orphans, and the poor.
On the other hand, in the Book of Job God does not give a reason for Job’s suffering, instead asking if Job can fathom the purposes of any of God’s inscrutable actions. why God permits the actions of God.  Although I often do not agree with Bart Ehrman’s conclusions, I rarely disagree with the evidence he cites in his works. Another recent best seller is by Rabbi Harold Kushner: When Bad Things Happen to Good People. We plan to reflect on both these works sometime in 2025. […]