You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints.

This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an Apostolate helping Catholics

understand, live, and share their faith.

Welcome to our third session on Augustine's Confessions. I am Dr. Liz Klein, a professor here at the Augustine Institute, and I'm joined by my colleague, Dr. John Seahorn. And so we've already done two episodes where we kind of introduced the confessions in Augustine, his time and place. In the last session, we talked about Augustine's writing and autobiography,

what it means to talk about yourself and how we can apply that. And now we're going to talk about

Augustine's intellectual conversion, which is a really important part of the narrative of the

confessions, how he kind of sorts out the different religious options of his day, the different doctrines of his day,

and that coming to understand the truth is really essential to the confessions. And I was thinking,

as we were preparing for this session, I wrote a review of a book on a popular book on St. Augustine.

I won't mention the name because I don't want to, you know, anyone to be too scared away from it. But I was reviewing this book and the author said that,

you know, when he read Augustine the theologian and read his doctrinal works that really he just

thought Augustine was drawing boring, but then when he read the confessions and saw the

heart of Augustine and the road weary saint, and he was really attracted to Augustine. And I think it's important that we understand

that this is the same Augustine, that Augustine, the the theologian, is also the Augustine

who wrote the confessions because Augustine the bishop wrote the confessions, right? It wasn't

like, you know, young whippersnapper Augustine with lots of emotions and feelings about the confessions and then boring old theologian Augustine kind of carried him off to the end. So, so what, an intellectual

conversion is still really essential to many people today. So trying to go through those, those

turns intellectually, talk about some of those doctrinal differences, why they matter to him and why

they should matter to us.

So that's what we're hoping to look at.

Yeah, and I think that point, Dr. Klein, about why they should matter to us is really worth

kind of dwelling on because I think it is true, you know, in keeping with the author of the

...