Recent Books on Augustine, Slavery, and Race

This roundtable panel centers on two books being published in 2024 on Augustine, slavery, and race: Toni Alimi's Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics (Princeton University Press) and Matthew Elia's The Problem of the Christian Master: Augustine in the Afterlife of Slavery (Yale University Press). The topic of slavery Augustine's thought has been understudied, despite the prominence of the lexicon of slavery and mastery (metaphorical as well as scriptural) that Augustine deploys and his own positioning on the issue of Roman enslavement. Both of these works draw critical attention to this pressing topic and promise to advance the scholarship in field-changing ways.