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Augustine’s Confessions recounts a journey

undertaken with friends. This small project is, no less, the fruit of friendship. I am grateful to Kurt Berends, coordinator of the Christian Scholars Program at the University of Notre Dame for initially approaching me to write study guides on patristic texts for college fellowship groups. Kurt followed that invitation up by initiating student discussion groups at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, then taking the participants and me all out to eat to discuss the first draft of the guide and how to improve it. What author could dream of such intensive feedback? I was as nervous as I was before my dissertation defense, but as well fed as . . . I can’t remember when. Kurt then also initiated discussions with Jon Stock at Wipf & Stock to make this guide and a forthcoming one on the Sayings of the Desert Fathers a reality. I owe enormous thanks to him, to Jon, and to my editor K. C. Hanson.

I’m grateful to Professors Lewis Ayres of Candler School of Theology and Robert Wilken of the University of Virginia for teaching me to read Augustine. Both are model scholars. My own work, as reflected by my day job at the Christian Century, is much more journalistic, and aimed at non-specialists. Yet if I’ve gotten anything right according to the scholarship it is thanks to them.

I am grateful also to three small churches in rural North Carolina. I wrote this book in the basement of the parsonage of Purley and New Hope United Methodist Churches in Blanch, where my wife was pastor from 2001–2004. At the same time I was a student pastor at Shady Grove United Methodist, also in Caswell County. My hope with this work was to bring the sort of scholarship I got in Duke’s graduate program (with an occasional jaunt up to UVa) in contact with the sort of ordinary church life we treasured at these three congregations, topped off with the energy of a campus fellowship group like Intervarsity. Our churches’ patience with my life as a scholar-preacher helped inspire and make this possible.

I dedicate this book to the memory of my mother, Mary Ellen Schroeder: may God’s Spirit hasten her to the beatific vision.