2026 CMA Award Winner | First-time Author of Theological Subject
“He is most intimately present to the human heart, but the heart has strayed from him. Return to your heart, then, you wrongdoers, and hold fast to him who made you.”—St. Augustine
St. Augustine’s Confessions is the first autobiography in Western literature and a perennial classic of rhetoric, philosophy, and theology. It is also one man’s journey away from and back to God, finding himself along the way. And though Augustine’s sin and his desires for love, happiness, and peace are his own, in them we can recognize aspects of our own experience.
Return to the Heart: The Biblical Spirituality of St. Augustine’s Confessions invites readers to follow in the footsteps of an enduring spiritual master. Bringing St. Augustine’s wisdom to a new generation, Shane Owens reveals that it is only in the heart-to-heart encounter with God that we become whole and understand ourselves.
Return to the Heart gives convincing testimony from St. Augustine to the reality that an ever-present God is at work in our lives to bring us to conversion—and to eternal life.
“Shane Owens is among the most brilliant Augustinian scholars of his generation, and with great depth and elegance he has written a veritable treasure trove of a book on the biblical spirituality that pours forth from Augustine’s Confessions. Take Return to the Heart into your hands, open its pages, and give thanks to God for the light which he will shine into your soul from it! Highly recommended!”
– C. C. Pecknold, Associate Professor of Theology at the Catholic University of America
"He is most intimately present to the human heart, but the heart has strayed from him. Return to your heart, then, you wrong-doers, and hold fast to him who made you."
St. Augustine,
The Confessions 4.12.18
