The Weeping Man in the Baptistery

On the night before Easter, 387 AD, a thirty-two-year-old professor named Augustine stepped into the baptismal pool at the cathedral in Milan. Bishop Ambrose stood waist-deep in the water, waiting. For nearly two decades, Augustine had run from God — through the lecture halls of Carthage and Rome, through Manichaean philosophy, through a string of relationships that left him hollow.…