For St. Augustine, Christ was not only the goal of learning but also the way there: “See how Christ crucified is taught and learned,” he wrote, “and know that it relates to his cross that in his body we too are crucified to the world.”
In this public presentation, Catechesis Institute director Alex Fogleman introduces his new book, Knowledge, Faith, and Early Christian Initiation (Cambridge University Press, 2023), with comments from David Lyle Jeffrey and Q&A.
Hosted a Christ Church Waco on January 18, 2024.
About the Book:
Knowledge, Faith, and Early Christian Initiation presents a new history of the rise of catechesis in the early church. What was its central focus? How did new believers learn to know the God revealed in Jesus Christ? By attending to the earliest writings about catechesis in the second century and third century, to its prominent champions in the fourth and fifth centuries, Fogleman reveals the central role that catechesis played in early Christian devotion, ethics, and theology.
Patristic catechesis also sheds new light on central questions about faith and education. How does Christianity teach wisdom and virtue to those just starting out? And what difference do Christian commitments to understanding Jesus Christ as both divine and human make for Christian modes of knowing? By listening to the voices of the ancient past, we gain new insight and imagination for building communities of faithful witness in the present.
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For St. Augustine, Christ was not only the goal of learning but also the way there: “See how Christ crucified is taught and learned,” he wrote, “and know that it relates to his cross that in his body we too are crucified to the world.”
In this public presentation, Catechesis Institute director Alex Fogleman introduces his new book, Knowledge, Faith, and Early Christian Initiation (Cambridge University Press, 2023), with comments from David Lyle Jeffrey and Q&A.
Hosted a Christ Church Waco on January 18, 2024.
About the Book:
Knowledge, Faith, and Early Christian Initiation presents a new history of the rise of catechesis in the early church. What was its central focus? How did new believers learn to know the God revealed in Jesus Christ? By attending to the earliest writings about catechesis in the second century and third century, to its prominent champions in the fourth and fifth centuries, Fogleman reveals the central role that catechesis played in early Christian devotion, ethics, and theology.
Patristic catechesis also sheds new light on central questions about faith and education. How does Christianity teach wisdom and virtue to those just starting out? And what difference do Christian commitments to understanding Jesus Christ as both divine and human make for Christian modes of knowing? By listening to the voices of the ancient past, we gain new insight and imagination for building communities of faithful witness in the present.
Sensing the Sacred: A Conversation with Hanna Lucas, Simon Oliver, and Ephraim Radner
Catechesis Institute
1 year ago
Sensing the Sacred: A Conversation with Hanna Lucas, Simon Oliver, and Ephraim Radner
The late modern world teaches us, in various and sundry ways, a highly reductionist account of what it means to know someone or something—including, especially, what it means to know God. With a metaphysic stripped of any real connection to a transcendent source of being, we cannot help but imbibe a truncated form of knowledge and learning.
By mining the depths of patristic mystagogy—instruction in the rites of initiation (usually right after baptism)—Hanna Lucas brings to light a rich pedagogical tapestry that can show us a better way forward. Through patient and careful engagement with writings of Ambrose of Milan, Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom, and Theodore of Mopsuestia, Lucas shows how patristic mystagogy grounds a theological epistemology that sees knowledge as part of the “capacitation” of our nature for heavenly mysteries and union with God. The patristic catechists teach us how even the mundane aspects of knowledge, including the rudiments of matter and sensation, fit into a larger divine gift of capacitation.
The result is a holistic and integrated theory of knowledge that envisions one all-encompassing divine pedagogy that orients toward union with God. This union is experienced fully in the eschaton, but it breaks into time through the sacraments of the church, and it echoes down through the ordinary modes of knowing we encounter in daily life. Mundane knowledge beckons the knower to become capable of a sublime intelligence: to become capable of union with the divine. This integrative, unitive, and eschatologically oriented vision of knowledge stands in stark contrast to modern and postmodern epistemologies. Sensing the Sacred positions mystagogy as a timely remedy for the “incapacitations” that modernity offers us.
Catechesis Institute
For St. Augustine, Christ was not only the goal of learning but also the way there: “See how Christ crucified is taught and learned,” he wrote, “and know that it relates to his cross that in his body we too are crucified to the world.”
In this public presentation, Catechesis Institute director Alex Fogleman introduces his new book, Knowledge, Faith, and Early Christian Initiation (Cambridge University Press, 2023), with comments from David Lyle Jeffrey and Q&A.
Hosted a Christ Church Waco on January 18, 2024.
About the Book:
Knowledge, Faith, and Early Christian Initiation presents a new history of the rise of catechesis in the early church. What was its central focus? How did new believers learn to know the God revealed in Jesus Christ? By attending to the earliest writings about catechesis in the second century and third century, to its prominent champions in the fourth and fifth centuries, Fogleman reveals the central role that catechesis played in early Christian devotion, ethics, and theology.
Patristic catechesis also sheds new light on central questions about faith and education. How does Christianity teach wisdom and virtue to those just starting out? And what difference do Christian commitments to understanding Jesus Christ as both divine and human make for Christian modes of knowing? By listening to the voices of the ancient past, we gain new insight and imagination for building communities of faithful witness in the present.
