Confessions | Study Edition. This item is unavailable.Confessions | Study Edition

Aurelius Augustinus (354-430) was born and raised in Roman North Africa. His mother Monica provided a Catholic upbringing in his modest home town of Thagaste. However, Augustine preferred the liberties available to young men of his time and place. He also excelled at school. As a student at Carthage he joined the Manichean religious sect. After teaching rhetoric at Carthage and then Rome, he rose to become the official spokesperson for the Roman Emperor in Milan. Amidst a crisis of faith and doubt, Augustine read the writings of Neo-Platonic philosophers and listened to the preaching of Bishop Ambrose of Milan. Resigning from imperial service, the 32 year old Augustine began an intensive study of scripture. He was baptized by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil in April of 387. A year later he returned to Africa and within several years was ordained to serve the diocese of Hippo (present day Annaba, Algeria), as priest and then bishop. Charged with the pastoral care of his people, and confronted by the major doctrinal controversies in the early Church, Augustine employed his significant rhetorical skills and his genius for writing to compose some of the foundational texts of Christian theology in the Latin West. These include his Confessions, Teaching Christianity, The City of God, The Trinity, Expositions of the Psalms-to name just a few of his many books. We also have almost 300 of his letters to a wide variety of correspondents, and 400 of his sermons.

Maria Boulding (1929-2009) was born in Wimbledon in south London in 1929. She spent 62 of her 80 years as a much-valued member of Stanbrook Abbey, a community of enclosed Benedictine nuns. She translated St. Augustine's Confessions (1997) and his Expositions of the Psalms in several volumes (2000-2004), to much acclaim. She is the author of Marked for Life: Prayer in the Easter Christ; The Coming of God; and Gateway to Hope: An Exploration of Failure. She served on the advisory board for the series Works of Saint Augustine, A Translation for the 21st Century.