via wikipedia commons: “The Arka Church” in Nowa Huta, Poland. St. Augustine’s City of God is such a vast body of work that to write several thousand words on the document would be futile. Instead of writing a quasi-commentary on the text, the hope here to highlight the theme of salvation historiography that Augustine attempts to flesh out from the fall of the Roman empire. … Continue reading The Ark of History: St. Augustine’s City of God
What can be written about St. Augustine’s Confessions that has not already been written? The Confessions is the first great autobiography of Western Civilization from one of the great pillars of Western thought and rhetoric. Furthermore, it is an examination of the conscience of a man, who with contrition in his heart, tells his conversion story. If one were to read only the first page, one could … Continue reading Let Your Heart Burn for the Lord. St. Augustine–The Confessions
St. Augustine is the cornerstone, so to speak, with the development of predestination theology and with its role of Grace and justification in the Christian life. The New Catholic Encyclopedia informs that “Prior to the time of St. Augustine the Fathers of the Church were not preoccupied with the problem of predestination. It was the bishop of Hippo who first treated the mystery exhaustively, with the theological … Continue reading Has God chosen you to love? St. Augustine: On the Predestination of the Saints
publicdomanpictures.net Greetings! Our next discussion group will be on St. Augustine’s document called On the Predestination of the Saints, chapter four in the Matthew Levering book The Theology of Augustine. As I discussed in the last group, this is a difficult topic within Christianity and also Catholicism. So, I have included a link to Matt Fradd’s Podcast “Pints with Aquinas,” if anyone wants to get … Continue reading “God is Light and in him no Darkness”–Discussion update!
It is from the beginning of his prologue on the Homilies on the First Epistle of John that Augustine explains in his usual rhetorical grandeur that, “as in this same Epistle, which is very sweet to all who have a healthy taste of the heart to relish the Bread of God, and very meet to be had in remembrance in God’s Holy Church, charity is … Continue reading Introduction: Augustine’s Homilies on the First Epistle of John.
In his book The Theology of Augustine, Matthew Levering focuses on the theme of love, what is love and how it functions in Christian teaching. As Levering examines, according to Augustine, Scripture teaches how to love. It must be vital for the interpreter of scripture to recognize how the words of scripture direct us to love of God. So what does it mean to love? … Continue reading St. Augustine: On Christian Doctrine Commentary–Full Text
St. Augustine is the most quoted Saint in the Catechism of the Catholic Church with 87 Citations followed by St. Thomas Aquinas at 61. Naturally, in many respects, as asserted by Bishop Robert Barron asserts in his Pivotal Players series, St. Augustine is “one of three or four most important players in the history of the Church…he is a pivotal figure in the development of … Continue reading On the Influence of St. Augustine
