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Kim Paffenroth and Robert P. Kennedy, editors A Reader's Companion to Augustine's Confessions Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003 Pp. vi + 282.
The modern "companion" to a classic work or author is usually a kind of tourist's guide. It walks the reader round the chosen monument, supplies some context, points out significant features, and suggests avenues of closer approach. Augustinian tourists with theological and philosophical interests already have a Cambridge Companion on that model. The editors of this new "reader's companion," to their credit, have attempted something different. Instead of the Confessions as monument, they present the work as a recurring hermeneutic problem-one with at least as many possible solutions as it has "books," each of the thirteen of which is here treated in turn by a separate contributor as furnishing the key to an overall interpretation. Such a view of the Confessions as a text that continually poses and answers itself as a question is admirably suited to current ways of reading it and not only in the classroom. Addressing themselves to "nonscholars" (6) on...