Kathleen Bonnette is the author of (R)evolutionary Hope: A Spirituality of Encounter and Engagement in an Evolving World. Millennial editor Robert Christian interviewed her on the book, St. Augustine, her life, and faith.

Throughout your book (R)evolutionary Hope, St. Augustine seems to play a vital role in your thinking and explanations. When you think about your faith today, how has it been shaped by St. Augustine?

It was actually reading Confessions as an undergrad that captured my spiritual imagination and drew me into the church. I had been raised evangelical and didn’t know that Christianity has such a rich intellectual tradition—yet here was a brilliant thinker, articulating questions about God and human experience in a way that was both passionate and creative. In Augustine’s theological approach, I found an open invitation to question, and the integration of intellect, emotion, and creativity in his theology struck me as authentically human and resonated with the pieces of myself that had been excluded from faith endeavors to that point. I knew I wanted to be a part of that tradition, and Augustine has been such a companion on this faith journey that now, even though my faith has evolved through various experiences and encounters, I still think in dialogue with him.

What are some key lessons we should learn from St. Augustine?

Three things come immediately to mind:

1. We are fundamentally relational beings. In Augustine’s conversion story, we see him encounter God through various experiences—initially, it’s a purely intellectual endeavor; then, his heart comes into the equation as he begins to love the God he has come to know. But the most fulfilling experience he recounts occurs in communion—he and his mother, together, have a vision of all beings communally worshiping the divine, each participating fully in the web of life. For Augustine, to experience the divine, we have to bring our whole selves into community, and our flourishing is absolutely tied to the flourishing of our neighbors.

2. When we pursue domination and control, we fail to love well—the lust for domination is the root of sin. Augustine was living through the fall of the Roman Empire, and he experienced deeply traumatic personal losses pretty early in his life, so in much of his writing, especially in Confessions, he is grappling with his longing for stability and control despite the vulnerability of being human. One of the key insights he comes to is that often, in efforts to find that stability, we try to cling to whatever we love so that it will never leave us—sometimes this looks like overbearing or jealous love; sometimes like selfishness; sometimes it looks like coercive religious manipulation as we try to convince others (and ourselves) that we know the truth. But Augustine eventually realizes that to be human simply is to grapple with our vulnerabilities, and the lust for domination turns us inward and closes us off from growth and relational wholeness. (Unfortunately for us, Augustine didn’t always hold to this insight, and some of his major inconsistencies—such as his belief that women should be subservient because we don’t image God fully in the way that men do—still persist in Catholicism today.)

3. Humility and curiosity are necessary for healthy faith. A lot of people use Augustine’s thought as justification for really hard-line, intransigent positions—and Augustine certainly held a few of those himself—but to me, it is his continuous questioning that should be his most enduring legacy. Augustine is a seeker, and the curiosity and humility that Augustine exemplifies—his willingness to ask hard questions and recognize that his conclusions might very well be wrong—could serve as transformative models for our Church today. Imagine what would happen if Catholics recognized, like Augustine, that their perception of God and interpretation of tradition is limited, and began to appreciate the ways in which other approaches to the divine could enrich their own understanding!

We seem to live in a culture fixated on maximizing autonomy. Why do relationships matter, and how are they connected to a person reaching their potential?

As Catholics, we believe we are made in the image of a God who is Trinity—a God who is fundamentally, actively, relational. This means that we, too, are inherently relational beings. Each of us is a unique individual, participating in the wholeness of the web of life.

Modern science is actually confirming this relational reality, giving a picture of a world not ordered statically or hierarchically, but evolutively and integrally. We know that everything is interconnected. Everything shares the same elements and energy and evolves through forging new relationships. Nothing is autonomous; and yet, each being is absolutely essential to the good of the whole. While the church—thanks, in part, to Augustine—has been built around a belief that the universe is structured hierarchically, according to a static order of goodness, we know now that there is no hierarchy of being; there is only being in community.

This way of looking at the world as an integrated whole is critical to avoiding the dominative and dualistic paradigms that have driven our obsession with autonomy, and in turn have motivated oppression and marginalization throughout history. A paradigm of hierarchy lends itself to the violence of power struggles; a paradigm of interconnection requires humility and embodied care.

I am convinced that when we really embrace our relationality, we participate in the creative energy of God, imaging the inherently relational, creative, and life-sustaining Trinity by weaving our lives together with others’ toward the flourishing of all—more than human world included!

Shout out here to the School Sisters of Notre Dame and so many other women religious, who taught me to live into this emerging paradigm and connect it with my Catholic faith.

When we think about striving for justice and communion, what role should encounter play?

Encounter should always shake us up and give us new ways of understanding our values, as we forge ever-expansive community! If our community has been exclusionary, it cannot be just; if we are evolving, so too should our moral consciousness.

I started to realize this when I served as a tutor in the education department of a maximum security prison. I was a twenty-year old white girl from rural Pennsylvania, and justice was absolutely black and white to me—though I had not had to acknowledge the systemic racial injustices that belied this. But when I encountered those men, my sense of justice was turned on its head and I began to think in terms of the relationships broken by the crimes committed as well as the exclusionary response to them. I still have a strong sense of justice, but it has evolved. I’ve had a number of experiences of this kind—I imagine most of us have. The question is whether we will allow them to transform us or not.

When it comes to church teaching, there are so many voices that have been marginalized or silenced or ignored, so often what seems like a challenge to our faith is actually an expression of divine experience that has yet to be included in it. Insofar as static, hierarchical worldviews fossilize the way we think about God or cause us to dismiss the insights of those who challenge our perceptions, they close us in on ourselves and can quickly turn our actions for justice quickly into the grasping, oppressive love that Augustine warns us about. To live in authentic community, we must reorient our loves to be ever more expansive, going out from ourselves in love to promote the full participation, influence, and embodied flourishing of all, especially those who have been marginalized (including the more than human world).

How does your faith affect your life outside of your work and writing?

My faith—through which I see the world as wholly relational, connected through the love of Christ—is at the heart of everything I do. I hope it helps me to live openly and responsively, attentive to the way I am relating to the world around me! My faith motivates me to care for the vulnerable, to check my dominative tendencies, to recognize the ways in which my actions might be harmful and to make amends. It motivates me to listen deeply, love passionately, and allow my whole self to be present wherever I find myself. It helps me do the difficult work of figuring out how to relate rightly to people on opposite ends of the political spectrum; and to be present even to the suffering of the world. I really think that once we understand the absolute interconnectedness of our existence, there is no distinction between matters of faith and life in general: we are called to live vulnerably into the creative and dynamic reality of love. I will also say that my three elementary-aged kids keep me grounded and teach me every day what this can look like!

Why are you Catholic in 2024?

To be honest, this is a question I’ve been grappling with quite a bit these days. Sometimes I am just not sure. I see a church that remains committed to a hierarchical worldview that does not track reality as we know it; I see a church that is often exclusionary and closed in on itself, resistant to transformation despite the harms it perpetuates. (Forgive me if I am skeptical that the Synod will lead to real or lasting change.)

And yet—I am still captivated by the richness of the Catholic tradition. Whatever we are evolving toward is connected to what we have evolved from, and it is important to me to remain grounded in that. The Catholic tradition offers a beautiful language for expressing our search for and relationship to the divine, and embracing a tradition that has stood for millennia and encompasses people around the globe offers a vantage point that necessitates wide moral vision and expansive community. Despite its limits and failures, the church, and especially the Eucharist, serves as a reminder that I am not the source or even the center of my life; I am but one integral part of a community that journeys toward the Whole, embodied in Christ. And I believe that as we encounter those who are marginalized, suffer loss, grapple with inconsistencies, and create new ways to embody and hand on our faith, we find the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ enacted over and over again in the work of loving the world.