Why This Text Matters | City of God | Willemien Otten

Religious studies courses can feature a broad range and variety of texts, including anything from The Daodejing, to The Mishnah, to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, to Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, to Said’s Orientalism. The Marty Center partnered with the Undergraduate Religious Studies Program to design “Why This Text Matters” as a series of videos to help faculty prepare for courses, their students, and anyone generally curious about important texts in the study of religion. In the space of about 30 minutes, viewers can gain a deeper understanding of the context, themes, and significance of texts taught by experts at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
About the Text:
Augustine’s City of God, while not as widely known as his Confessions, is a remarkable classic that is informative about Augustine’s own thought, but also about the society inwhich he lived, the Roman Empire, and, especially, the Christian society for which he lived. Seeing history as a struggle between the earthly and the heavenly city, Augustine sees earthly life as a mixed situation (civitas permixtum), until God will reveal whether we are citizens of the earthly or the heavenly city. The work has remained central for its encyclopedic knowledge about late antiquity, its wide-ranging biblical views, and for its remarkable speculations about paradise and human sexuality.