Augustine on Christians and Civil Government

I wrote a series of guest posts back in the summer of 2007 for the now-defunct blog Right Reason that I think might provide a good theoretical background for some of the issues going around right now on Christians and political participation.  When that blog suddenly vanished within the following year, I managed to get the content, including the comments, restored onto my personal blog. Rather than try to summarize them or post them here again, I thought I’d link to all the posts in the series and let people read them where I’ve already got them, and you can feel free to pick up the conversation either on those posts or in the comments here. Bear in mind that the original location of these posts was as guest posts at a politically-conservative philosophy blog. I wrote them with that audience in mind. I would probably have written them differently for this crowd.

1. Introduction: Christianity and Politics
2. Augustine on Civil Government: The Two Cities
3. Augustine on Civil Government: Two Further Preliminaries
4. Augustine on Civil Government: Authority
5. Augustine on Civil Government: The City of God and Compromise
6. Christian Political Participation
7. Religious Motivations in Politics