Fire on the Altar: A Lecture on St. Augustine – Prof. Chad Pecknold
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2026
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Prof. Chad Pecknold shows how St. Augustine’s Confessions should be read as a Catholic, sacramental account of conversion in which the “altar of the heart” is turned toward God and united to Christ’s Eucharistic sacrifice, rather than as a merely emotional, garden-conversion memoir.
This lecture was given on October 7th, 2025, at Vanderbilt University.
For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.
About the Speakers:
Dr. Chad C. Pecknold earned his PhD in Systematic Theology at the University of Cambridge in England. He is a Catholic theologian and for the last 16 years he has been a professor of theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington DC, teaching in the areas of fundamental theology, Christian anthropology and political theology. Since 2022, he has been named by The Catholic Herald as one of the most influential Catholic thought leaders and authors in the United States.
An internationally recognized scholar of Augustine’s theological and political thought, Pecknold has authored or edited five books — including Christianity and Politics: A Brief Guide to the History and The T&T Clark Companion to Augustine and Modern Theology —and authored dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles. He edits the Sacra Doctrina series for CUA Press with Fr. Thomas Joseph White O.P. He has served the public by educating thousands of students at the Institute of Catholic Culture, and also through his many columns at First Things, National Review, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and The Catholic Herald. He has been an invited guest on NPR's "All Things Considered," Fox News, ABC News, and has been a frequent guest on EWTN News Nightly, World Over Live with Raymond Arroyo, and various other EWTN programs, such as the celebrated series on Heresies.
Pecknold has also led institutions, serving as Chair of the American Academy of Catholic Theology from 2015-2020, expanding and professionalizing a guild of theologians faithful to the Magisterium. He also serves in non-profit board leadership as Board Director for Americans United for Life, Board Member for Pro-Life Partners, Board Member for the Classical Learning Test, Fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology, and as Resident Theologian at the Institute for Faith and Public Culture at the Basilica of Saint Mary — the oldest Catholic Church in the Commonwealth of Virginia. While currently finishing a short book on the Catholic understanding of Augustine’s Confessions, Pecknold continues to work on a long term project on Augustine’s City of God and the Christian order of things.
He and his wife Dr. Sara Pecknold (who teaches Music History at Christendom College) have five children, including adorably identical twin toddler girls whose names they frequently confuse!
Keywords: Altar Of The Heart, Augustine’s Confessions, Bad And Good Sacrifice, Eucharistic Conversion, Fire On The Altar, Platonic Ascent And Christ, Prof. Chad Pecknold, Restless Heart And Worship, St. Augustine And Monica, Sacramental Reading Of Augustine
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast. |
| 0:06.2 | Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. |
| 0:12.7 | The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world. |
| 0:19.3 | To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org. |
| 0:25.5 | I wanted to write a book on the Confessions that measured up to the Catholic faith. |
| 0:33.9 | Because Confessions is one of those texts that all Christians own, and even non-Christians own, |
| 0:41.3 | and I think that's a good thing. |
| 0:42.9 | It's a good thing that everybody owns Augustine's Confessions. |
| 0:46.9 | He's a saint for all times and all places, and for 1,600 years we've been remembering him. |
| 0:52.8 | I think one of the reasons why everyone wants to go back |
| 0:55.7 | and remember Augustine all the time is because he has kind of the blueprint for Western civilization. |
| 1:00.9 | He's got it all. And in the confessions, I think he has something of the Catholic DNA. But we often |
| 1:10.5 | read him through a Protestant lens. So, for example, |
| 1:14.6 | I was always struck by the fact that when I was a Protestant, I'm a convert for 20 years now, |
| 1:20.0 | but when I was a Protestant, it always struck me that Augustine's confessions sort of culminated |
| 1:26.5 | in Augustine crying in a Milanese garden. |
| 1:30.3 | He cried in the garden. |
| 1:32.3 | And it always struck me that that was the pinnacle of the confessions. |
| 1:36.3 | And here's why it struck me is a garden is not a church. |
| 1:41.3 | Right? |
| 1:43.3 | And tears, crying tears, okay, he cries tears over reading St. Paul, but that's a |
| 1:52.5 | kind of emotional, pietistic conversion that seems singular. And it always struck me like, |
... |
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