March 12, 2026
Online at 7:30pm ET
With Jim Peters
St. Augustine deserves to be recognized as one of the great patron saints of the environment. In his influential 1967 essay attacking Christianity for its supposed anthropocentrism and anti-environmentalism, Lynn White pointed to St. Augustine as a major cause of the problem. While his critique may have some merit with respect to modern western Christianity, White exhibited an unfortunate lack of any appreciation of Augustine’s rich philosophy of caring for creation. For Augustine, love of God is inseparable from both love of neighbor and love of God’s creation. Consequently, the talk will explore the crucial roles of humanity’s conversation with nature and humanity’s essential place in the community of nature in Augustine’s theology of the beauty and goodness of creation.
Jim Peters is Professor of Philosophy at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he began teaching in 1984. He has published articles on Plato, Augustine, C.S. Lewis, and the philosophy of religion. His book, The Logic of the Heart, Baker Academic 2009, explores the deep interconnectedness of the nature of reason, passion, and faith in the writings of Augustine, Pascal, and Hume. He teaches courses in environmental ethics, ancient philosophy, philosophy and literature, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and Kierkegaard. Other areas of particular literary as well as philosophical and theological interest are the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, C. S. Lewis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Eleonore Stump, and Wendell Berry.
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