The women around Augustine with Kate Cooper (S3:E3)
“This is an enslaved girl in Africa in the fourth century. Just talk about lost voices. And yet this child is literally creating the theological groundwork for the greatest of Latin theologians”
Welcome to In Search Of, a podcast where we go in search of voices and perspectives that inform and expand a life of faith. This week, we learn more about the many women who influenced St. Augustine, as a man and as a theologian. Whether it’s a name we know–like Monica or the Empress Justina–or a name lost to history–like Monica’s enslaved childhood companion or Augustine’s concubine–historian of gender and family, Kate Cooper, offers informed speculation on what their lives could have been like as women in the fourth century. All this and more on this episode of In Search Of. A transcript of this episode can be found here.
For further searching, check out these links:
- Get Kate’s book Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine’s Confessions
- And check out her book on Phoebe Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women
And don’t miss this related content from the Christian Century:
- “Sin is like a suitcase abandoned at the baggage claim” by Peter W. Marty (March 2021)
- “How Augustine responded to the problem of evil without solving it” by James K.A. Smith (October 2019)
- “Talking with Miriam Toews about Women Talking,” Elizabeth Palmer interviews Miriam Toews (May 2019)
- “Miriam Toews imagines her way into an insular community grappling with sexual assault” by Valerie Weaver-Zercher (May 2019)
- “Sin is about not knowing who we are” by Tricia Gates Brown (February 2019)
Is there something that you are in search of? Email us.
