Confessions of St. Augustine

Canon Williams will lead a six-session class on the Confessions of St. Augustine. 

Sundays, April 7 through May 12
9:00 am in Harvard Hall
Videos will be posted after the lecture

“For a thousand years and more of Western Christianity, Augustine was a theologian of unrivaled importance,” Canon Williams says. “To a remarkable degree, Christians even to this day — whether they realize it or not — think Augustine’s thoughts and draw up battle lines around Augustine’s controversies; theologians still wrestle with his understanding of the nature of God, of grace, of providence, of sin and the remedy for sin.”

But one need not share any of his theological beliefs to find Augustine well worth reading. And any reader — Christian or not, philosopher or not — will find much in Augustine that is captivating, inspiring, and challenging. For the story of Augustine’s life as he presents it in the Confessions is at once startlingly intimate and dizzyingly cosmic. 

“ ‘How can I make sense of this action?’ turns effortlessly into ‘How can anyone make sense of any action?’ ‘Why did I keep stepping on my own feet?’ leads to ‘Why do we all make such a mess of things?’— and, inevitably, to reflection on what exactly it means for a life, any life, to be a mess, and what it might look like for the mess to get cleaned up, for what is broken and fragmented and dispersed to get put back together.” 

The class will meet at 9:00 am on Sundays through May 12 in Harvard Hall, and yes, there will be coffee. Short excerpts from the Confessions will be available for participants to read before each session.

Participants are invited to buy Canon Williams’s translation of the Confessions here.
Canon Williams suggests the paperback; the Kindle edition, he cautions, is cluttered with parenthetical references.