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

by James K.A. Smith

“The consequence of a distorted will is passion. By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes necessity. By these links, as it were, connected one to another (hence my term a chain), a harsh bondage held me under restraint.”

“To desire the aid of grace is the beginning of grace.”

Sex is that paradoxical combination of vulnerability and assertion, giving ourselves up and wanting all the more.

The true friend is the other who has the courage to impose a conviction, who paints a substantive picture of the good, who prods and prompts you to change course and chase it—and promises to join you on the way.

The church isn’t a group of holier-than-thou saints who’ve formed a club; it’s a remarkable, otherwise impossible communion of people who, by the grace of God, stick alongside one another.

People look different through the lens of grace: instead of being competitors or threats, they’re gifts. Some are even friends.

And so they hate the truth for the sake of the object which they love instead of the truth. They love the truth for the light it sheds, but hate it when it shows them up as being wrong.

“Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story.”25

“The fear of death, with no grasp of what makes a life truly good, is the stupendously irrational desire for mere duration.”2

“What madness not to understand how to love human beings with awareness of the human condition!”