What is Truth?

Is Christian truth unchanging? Can it develop over time? To what extent may the Catholic community jettison or modify earlier beliefs? Should it embrace insights from other cultures or revise its views on matters such as the status of women or church-state relations? In this wide-ranging and provocative book, John Rist brings his expertise in ancient philosophy, theology and history to bear on these questions as they relate to Roman Catholicism and to human society at large, both in the early Christian centuries and in our own times.

John M. Rist is Emeritus Professor of Classics and Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he taught from 1959 to 1980 and again, following three years as Regius Professor of Classics at the University of Aberdeen, from 1983 to 1996. Since 1998 he has been part-time Visiting Professor at the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome. In 1976 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 1991 he was elected a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. In 1995 he was the Lady Davis Visiting Professor in Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is the author of over one hundred scholarly articles and numerous books including Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (1994) and Real Ethics (2001).