51����

Catherine Conybeare will discuss her recent book, which turns assumptions about the Western tradition on their head. 

Augustine of Hippo (354–430), also known as Saint Augustine, was one of the most influential theologians in history. His writings, including the autobiographical Confessions and The City of God, helped shape the foundations of Christianity and Western philosophy. But for many centuries, Augustine’s North African birth and Berber heritage have been simply dismissed. Catherine Conybeare, a world-renowned Augustine scholar, here puts the “African” back in Augustine’s story. As she relates, his seminal books were written neither in Rome nor in Milan, but in Africa, where he had returned as a wanderer during a perilous time when the Western Roman Empire was crumbling. Using extant letters and other shards of evidence, Conybeare retraces Augustine’s travels, revealing how his groundbreaking works emerge from an exile’s perspective within an African context. In its depiction of this Christian saint, Augustine the African upends conventional wisdom and traces core ideas of Christian thought to their origins on the African continent.

"Augustine the African is not just another biography, but a bold act of intellectual reparation. [Conybeare] remind[s] us through this book that to study Augustine is to study ourselves — our languages, our wounds, our contradictions, and our longing for a unity beyond division." Father Kolawole Chabi, OSA