Stolen Pears and Burning Hearts

He Confessed Everything — But Do You Know the Whole Story? Before Augustine became the greatest Doctor of the Church, he was a thief, a lover, a seeker, and a man in full flight from the God who refused to stop pursuing him. Stolen Pears and Burning Hearts tells that story — not as hagiography, but as lived, breathing, aching human experience. If you have ever stood at the crossroads of faith and doubt, desire and discipline, brilliant ambition and hollow restlessness, Augustine's early life will feel less like ancient history and more like a mirror. Rooted in the Confessions and warm with intellectual passion, this volume in the BrickHut Sanctuary: Sacred Lives series traces Augustine's journey from a boyhood prank in a Tagaste pear orchard through the smoke and fire of Carthage, the seductive logic of Manichaeism, the cold clarity of Neoplatonism, and finally to that extraordinary garden in Milan — where grace simply would not let him go. Here is the restless heart that gave Western Christianity some of its most enduring words, shown in all its contradiction, hunger, and ultimate surrender. What You Will Discover Inside: The famous pear-tree theft — and why Augustine saw in one boyish prank the signature of the human condition before God Carthage and its burning: the loves, ambitions, and intellectual storms that shaped a prodigy in a dangerous city The long detour through Manichaeism — why a brilliant young man found its dualist cosmology compelling, and how it ultimately failed him Monica's relentless tears and prayers — a portrait of a mother whose intercession became one of the great spiritual narratives in Christian history Neoplatonism as a stepping stone: how Plotinus and Porphyry brought Augustine to the edge of faith — and why philosophy alone could not carry

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