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 the show. My name is Dr. Elizabeth Klein. I'm a professor of theology here at the Augustine Institute.

And here with me is my colleague, Dr. John Seahorn. And we're very pleased to be filming a series on St. Augustine's Confessions.

So the Confessions is a really wonderful, rich text, but it's sometimes hard to read.

So we're hoping that this conversation can encourage you to read it and help accompany you if you are reading it.

So the first session we thought we would just open with a little bit about St. Augustine,

who he is when he lived and why he wrote the confessions.

So, Dr. Seahorn, do you want to start off with telling us a little bit about the basic

stats of St. Augustine?

Sure, yeah.

How about just his vitals, right?

So Augustine is born in November of 34, unless I'm a mistake. I got that one, right? Okay, good. In North Africa,

and sometimes that, even that itself is interesting to people. North Africa, of course,

at the time was part of the Roman Empire. If you haven't looked at a map recently,

it might not be a bad idea to get one out

and actually look at how close the African coast,

the Northern African coast, is to Italy.

I think a lot of times people sort of think of Italy

and North Africa as more separate than they were,

especially during Augustine's time.

So born in 354, died in 430. Nothing important happened during those years, right? Dr. Klein?

...