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Hi, welcome to Form. Welcome back to our series of shows on the Confessions. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Klein. I teach here at the Augustine Institute. I'm here with my colleague, Dr. John Seahorn. And in our last episode, we talked a little bit about Augustine's intellectual conversion on how sort of discovering the truth and changing his mind about who God is

was a significant part of his coming into the Catholic faith. But a lot of people already kind of

have the impression that the confessions is a very sort of solitary, soul-searching, existential

kind of conversion. So in this episode, we thought that we would talk about the other dimension of

his conversion, which is kind of the ecclesial conversion, that Augustine's true conversion is

his baptism. It's not, you know, just the moment in the garden when he hears the voices of

children. It's not just sort of the grasping of a concept, but it's really submitting himself

to the church and coming into the church through

her sacraments. So that's what we thought we've talked about today. So why don't we just

kind of kick it off with the general question? Where does the church feature for you? When you think

of the confessions and the ecclesial dimension, where does your mind go to where the church

really features? Well, kind of all over the place, actually.

Yeah, there are a number of angles we could take in approaching this.

You know, one thing I think we'll talk about in a future episode is actually the very

form of the confessions as a prayer, because on the one hand, this is Augustine speaking to God.

But on the other hand, he knows he's going to publish it. He knows other people are going to

read it as well. And so there's already a kind of communal aspect to this. So maybe one place

to start is with one of the most famous aspects of the confessions,

which is the role of St. Augustine's mother, St. Monica. Right. So Monica comes from a fairly

kind of simple, pious, North African, Catholic background.

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