Julian and Augustine in July and August

Yesterday I read a few more chapters in The Christ Who Heals by Fiona and Terryl Givens. I started it back in May when we were out house hunting, but I hadn't done much with it in the months since. The book discusses many early Christian philosophers, some which agree with Mormon theology and some who don't. As I was reading I recognized the name Julian of Norwich. A few days earlier I had been hunting around on hymnary.org to see if there was a good hymn about Isaiah 49 (since it's such got such lovely imagery and ought to be in the new LDS hymnbook someday) and found some hymns based on Julian wrote about the chapter. She really has a lot of lovely ideas about God, such as the Sacrament being like breastfeeding (the one time I nursed a baby during the actual Sacrament I realized how similar the two were). I'd heard her name before but now seeing it twice in the same week meant I know for sure who she is.

Then there also was Augustine. Him again? I thought, even though I know that you can't really talk about early Christians without talking about him. He got a few pages to himself in How the Irish Saved Civilization (which was a fun, probably mostly historically accurate book). He showed up in Speaking Into the Air since he had thoughts on communication. And of course he showed up in The Christ Who Heals. I think he had more good ideas than bad, but unfortunately some of the bad ideas seemed to have the longest shelf life in Christian theology (such as original sin).

Anyway, two takeaways from seeing these names over and over again are:

1. I don't know why I keep reading philosophy books. It just keeps happening on accident. Yet the only fiction books I've read since getting here that aren't rereads are the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. That's what I've been reading these days --Socrates and Greg Heffley.

2. It's always bizarre to me that any one person's voice can be so influential. Like, why have so many unhealthy traditions been propagated just because of two or three verses in the Pauline epistles? Who decided that Augustine's ideas were more correct than Julian's?

If Augustine were alive now, this xkcd comic is probably what would have happened instead:

Any suggestions for September-y named philosophers?