Summer Study at St. John’s Episcopal Church: St. Augustine’s Confessions
St. Augustine, arguably the most influential Christian theologian in the West, penned his Confessions while serving as a bishop in North Africa. Although the Confessions is written unashamedly from within the Christian tradition, its message speaks both to Christians and non-Christians alike-to anyone who has experienced the pangs and pulls of a restless, unquiet heart. In books I-IX, Augustine takes us through the winding journey of his boyhood, adolescence and young adulthood without hesitating to reveal his moral, intellectual, and other struggles and failings along the way. Through a series of encounters with various texts and individuals, both pagan and Christian, which include Cicero, the Platonists, St. Ambrose, and St. Paul, Augustine encounters Jesus Christ in a life-transforming way and narrates this experience in the famous garden-scene conversion of book VIII. We invite you to join us at St. John’s this summer during the month of June, as we “take up and read” Augustine’s Confessions, with the hope of being transformed ourselves and entering into the life, thought and prayers of this great saint.
Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we humans, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you-we who carry our mortality about us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. Yet these humans, due part of your creation as they are, still do long to praise you. You stir us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you (St. Augustine, Confessions, Boulding translation).
Class details: The class will be taught by Cynthia R. Nielsen (me), doctoral student of philosophy at the University of Dallas, and will meet at St. John’s Episcopal Church on Tuesdays from 6:30-8pm during the month of June, beginning June 3, 2008. For more information email Cynthia Nielsen at crn@pobox.com. For those who desire to read the book while taking the course, I highly recommend (but do not require) Maria Boulding’s translation of the Confessions, which is the translation that I will be using for the course.
2 Responses so far
Jim Gordon
May 10th, 2008
9:32 am
Maria Boulding’s translation of Augustine’s Confessions. I still remember reading this wise learned woman’s book on failure, Gateway to Hope, and her advent book The Coming of God. She writes beautifully, and that’s what i think makes her translation of Augustine so attractive. It takes a good writer to be a good translator – just as it takes an experience rich spirituality to translate the rich spirituality woven into the seams of such a text.
I hope your classes go well – too far for me to travel from Glasgow, Scotland! I do enjoy the stimulus in your posts, and the way they push me into unfamiliar areas of my own exploration.
Best wishes
Jim Gordon
Cynthia R. Nielsen
May 10th, 2008
9:40 am
Thanks, Jim. I am excited about teaching the course, as it will be my first go at teaching the Confessions–a book which is dear to my heart and was quite intrumental to my own conversion.
Best wishes to you in Glasgow!
Cynthia
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