Augustine and Autobiography: Confessions as a Roadmap for Self-Reflection
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2015, Vol 6, Issue 1
Abstract
In this article, I explore a pedagogical strategy for teaching Augustine’s Confessions to undergraduate students, which involves a final essay assignment. In the assignment, students compose their own “confessions” at the end of the term that employs Augustine’s Confessions as a roadmap for rigorous self-reflection. Like Augustine, they must employ a creative literary frame, without duplicating his rhetorical technique of framing his autobiography as a prayer to God. Moreover, they must reflect on the salient questions, key people, pivotal moments that have shaped them, and analyze their shifts in worldviews. The assignment aims to demystify Augustine and to reinforce the evolving nature of the self as it moves through time and absorbs new ideas and experiences, as well as helping students begin to formulate a coherent and constructive life narrative.
Authors and Affiliations
Mark S. M. Scott
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25418
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel6010139
- Views 335
- Downloads 11
Economic Inequality and the New School of American Economics
This essay analyzes economic inequality in the Gilded Age, roughly from 1865 to 1900. It focuses specifically on a group of economists who identified working-class consumption as an economic stimulus, and accordingly a...
The Dardenne Brothers and the Invisible Ethical Drama: Faith without Faith
The cinema of the Dardenne brothers represents a new kind of cinema, one that challenges a number of our conventional ways of thinking about the distinction between religion and secularism, belief and unbelief. Their f...
“Vibrating between Hope and Fear”: The European War and American Presbyterian Foreign Missions
Scholars have argued that World War I and its aftermath caused a rapid transformation in American global philanthropy. The decline of the American “moral empire” coincided with the rise of professional, bureaucratic, a...
Spiritual Jihad among U.S. Muslims: Preliminary Measurement and Associations with Well-Being and Growth
Religious and spiritual (r/s) struggles entail tension and conflict regarding religious and spiritual aspects of life. R/s struggles relate to distress, but may also relate to growth. Growth from struggles is prominent...
The Body in Grief: Death Investigations, Objections to Autopsy, and the Religious and Cultural ‘Other’
Sudden, violent and otherwise unexplained deaths are investigated in most western jurisdictions through a Coronial or medico-legal process. A crucial element of such an investigation is the legislative requirement to r...