Shannon Costello

The pope recently spoke at the United Nations in New York, where he proved himself more than capable of intelligent discourse in a secular setting. I admire that. I see American Christianity as having a tendency to immerse itself in its own subculture so much as to make itself nearly incomprehensible to the [...]

It is interesting how a distrust of a foundational text can affect one’s perception of an argument. Augustine selects a writer with whom he wishes to dispute. He supplies his readers with a short quote, and builds his arguments on the assumptions in that quote.
Apuleius asserted that the gods [...]

Educators believe that persons are more likely to learn if their brains are noting connections between that which they are learning and what they already know. I sometimes think this is why I am so poor at geography. I memorized maps as isolated facts and now find I have retained relatively little knowledge [...]

Last week in the dining room we were forced to destroy some invading ants. CJ’s initial stomping technique was not as effective as that of squashing with the bare thumb. The latter approach more nearly describes Augustine’s tactics against Roman theology (or Greek- I won’t differentiate here between the two.) Augustine systematically [...]

The first five books argue against those who serve the gods to receive temporal blessing. Augustine now turns his attention to those who seek eternal life.
His main focus in on the theological work of Marcus Varro, who subdivided theology into fabulous, civil, and natural theologies. In this book Augustine concerns himself [...]

Augustine describes Cicero as a man whose logic had forced him into a false dichotomy: either man has free will and foreknowledge does not exist or man does not have free will and foreknowledge does exist.
Augustine assures us of God’s prescience while maintaining free will. For him, a God without foreknowledge is no [...]

I confess:  reading just about anything else is easier than Augustine!
There is a fuzzy line between defending one’s own views and questioning the views of one’s opponents.   I’m not certain when and to what extent the latter is inappropriate, but that is something I’ve wondered straight from Book First.   It is a question whose answer [...]

With what effrontery, then, with what assurance, with what impudence, with what folly, or rather insanity, do they refuse to impute these disasters to their own gods, and impute the present to our Christ! (106)
Augustine had hundreds of years of Roman history in which to locate a myriad of disasters to repeatedly make his point. [...]