Augustine: God, Self, and Desire in the Confessions

Join us on Thursdays this Advent (Dec 3, 10, 17) for a class on one of the greatest theologians in Church history and one of the most influential texts in Western Culture: Augustine’s Confessions. The Confessions (400 CE) is at once a spiritual autobiography, a philosophical meditation on memory and time, and a prayer addressed to God. This work remains a dynamic source for the modern Christian’s reflection on desire and the self. Written in his early forties looking back on a restless youth, it is one of the founding texts of Western psychology, philosophy, and theology. Over three sessions we will look at the narrative heart of the work (Books 1–9), as well as sample its more difficult philosophical final books (10–13), tracing how Augustine turns the story of his own life into an argument about the nature of the self, desire, sin, time, and most importantly God. We will learn from Augustine how to uncover God’s presence in our past, present, and future and how God’s love draws us to himself.

Reclaiming Our Spiritual Heritage This Advent semester features another class from our ongoing series “Reclaiming Our Spiritual Heritage.” We live in a strange time, a time in which our culture shows signs of a deep spiritual thirst and a time in which the Church in America is shrinking. There are, no doubt, many reasons for this but one is certainly that many people simply do not find spiritual sustenance in American churches. Reclaiming Our Spiritual Heritage hopes to address this problem by providing a series of classes which introduce participants to the some of the great figures of the Christian tradition. At a time when much Christian “spirituality” has become sentimental, therapeutic, and ungrounded in Christian doctrine, Reclaiming Our Spiritual Heritage will connect participants to the teaching and works of great Christians for whom Christian doctrine and Christian spirituality were organically connected. The figures to be examined in this series are both Protestant and Catholic and come from both the Western and Eastern Church. Reclaiming Our Spiritual Heritage will help participants to overcome what C. S. Lewis called “presentism”, the notion that our present concerns and our present understanding of things are ultimate and final.