David Vincent Meconi, S.J., is the Director of the Catholic Studies Centre and Professor of Theology at Saint Louis University, USA. His recent publications include The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (2013) and, as editor, The Confessions: Saint Augustine of Hippo (2012) and (co-edited with Eleonore Stump) The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (2014). He is the Editor of Homiletic and Pastoral Review.

• Foreword by Eleonore Stump, St Louis University, USAAbbreviations and AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1: God and Those Made to Become Like GodChapter 2: Becoming God Without God?Chapter 3: Those Pears: Sin As Self-SabotageChapter 4: Narcissism and the Paradox of Self-LoveChapter 5: Atonement and the Vulnerable ChristConclusionFurther ReadingIndex

It takes great philosophical tact and a pastor’s humility to be able to enter into the troubled waters of self-hatred and find there the wreckage, still salvageable, of a lost love. David Meconi possesses tact and humility in abundance, and he writes beautifully on behalf of “those who want to disappear” (desiderantibus evanescere). By his Augustinian lights, that is, at some time or another, just about all of us.