Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance has been lying a lot lately, misleading audiences about aid to Hurricane Helene victims, the number of undocumented children in Michigan schools and the effects of his boss’s plans on auto workers.

“O Lord, grant me chastity. But not yet.”

So goes the most famous line from the most famous work by perhaps the most famous Christian theologian, the fourth-century North African church father, St. Augustine. The line appears at a crucial point in “The Confessions,” a conversion memoir that has spoken to readers for centuries in no small part because of the author’s humor and candor — which are so clearly on display here.

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the “Hillbilly Elegy” memoirist J.D. Vance — a recent convert to Catholicism and Trumpism — frequently mentions Augustine as a singular intellectual and spiritual influence. (When he became a Catholic, he took Augustine as his patron saint.) Vance has reportedly been reading him since college and suggests in an essay in the Catholic journal the Lamp that Augustine offers “the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read.”

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Now Vance cites Augustine’s works a lot. He quotes the “City of God” and “The Literal Meaning of Genesis,” and he’s quite familiar with “The Confessions.” But........

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