Wisdom from Augustine in an election year

James K.A. Smith on what we can learn from Augustine in our current political moment:

Perhaps what we can learn from him is the importance of politics as a mode of timekeeping, a particular way of inhabiting time. For Augustine, we cannot answer the question “What should we do?” unless we first answer the question “When are we?” Augustine offers a tool kit to help us forge a common life and commonweal in this long meantime of our existence. Some of these tools were picked up centuries later and put to work in the founding conceptions of political liberalism. All of them help us to understand when we are.

Published: The Christian Century