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<p>This project rereads the political thought of Augustine of Hippo in the Black Lives
Matter era. In the last two decades, scholars of religion and politics made a striking
return to the constructive resources of the Augustinian tradition to theorize citizenship,
virtue, and the place of religion in public life. However, these scholars have not
sufficiently attended to Augustine’s embrace of the position of the Christian slaveholder
in light of the fact that the contemporary situation to which they apply his thought
is itself the afterlife of slavery. The ghosts of slaves and masters live on, haunting
the ongoing social meanings of blackness and whiteness in American life. To confront
a racialized world, the Augustinian tradition must reckon with its own entanglements
with the afterlife of the white Christian master. This reckoning demands a constructive
encounter, at once timely and long overdue, between Augustine’s politics and the resources
of modern Black thought. Drawing from these two intellectual traditions, this constructive
religious ethics dissertation develops a critical account of the problem of the Christian
master, even as it presses toward an alternative construal of key concepts of ethical
life—agency, virtues, temporality—against and beyond the framework of mastery.</p>
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