Shannon Costello

"It is He who…deem[ed] it to be more befitting His power and goodness to bring god out of evil than to prevent evil from coming into existence."
It’s like hiking cross-country, forcing your way through thorn bushes and trees only to find yourself face to face with a granite wall.  You think you have your theological [...]

I like how Augustine embraced his culture on one hand and yet was wholly separate from it on  the other.  He does not hesitate to use the secular writers (mostly Virgil in this book) and his knowledge of science (salamanders that live in fire, worms able to survive only in hot springs) to make his [...]

It has taken a Sunday School class to inspire me to go back to Augustine.  I haven’t been reading it regularly.
Let’s see…how can I explain this?  There’s something relaxing- peace - that comes from thinking about the big picture.
I get really humiliated when I think I’ve done something incorrectly or something others might consider stupid.  [...]

So near to the end…and yet so far, given how little time I have actually read any of this book in the past year…two years?
In any case, 2 thoughts from #19:
1)  “And yet the more friends we have, and the more widely they are scattered, the more numerous are our fears that some portion of [...]

1)  I am determined to finish this book someday! 
2)  A nice math quote:  “And the verses are twenty-seven, which is the cube of three.  For three times three are nine; and nine itself, if tripled, so as to rise from the superficial square to the cube, comes to twenty-seven.” (page 629)
3)  Augustine spends [...]

I am interested in how one should go about deciding when a passage of scripture is to be taken literally.
Augustine talks about layers of interpretation:  “But just as, I think, they err greatly who are of opinion that none of the records of affairs in that kind of writings mean anything more than that they [...]

I know, I know, everyone was hoping I had finished, or forgotten, or something. Anything! But with the completion of Book Sixteenth I have only 299 pages left, so take heart!
Here is the most personally relevant quote: “Now every temptation is not blameworthy; it may even be praiseworthy, because it [...]

I remember arguing with Mr. Yettru in 9th grade English class about whether or not Robert Frost’s poems (such as “Mending Fences” and “The Road not Taken”) could be interpreted figuratively. He wasn’t able to convince me. Now I see that discussion as an example of the immaturity of the adolescent mind, but [...]