Over the time of his ministry, Augustine came more strongly to see that only in heaven will we find the fullness of peace. This chapter reviews Augustine’s preaching on heaven and its peace first in its ecclesial and liturgical settings. It then takes into consideration objections faced by his people to Christian faith in the resurrection of the dead. Then it reviews the face-to-face vision of God and the communal dimensions of the heavenly Jerusalem where angels and saints experience peace together. The chapter focuses on Augustine’s preaching on the words “amen” and “alleluia” that express our whole activity in heaven’s peace.

This introduction extols reasons to study Augustine’s sermons for the academy and Church today. It introduces the sixteen chapters written by an international team of experts. It then lays the foundation of humility for the rest of the volume by considering this theme in the volume’s three parts: Augustine’s pastoral task of preaching sermons; sermons on the Scriptures and liturgical feasts; and preaching themes.

In his sermons, Augustine applies his more theoretical considerations of God’s impact on human willing to the concrete, day-to-day challenges of his flock. As he seeks to spur his congregation on in its mundane struggles of will, Augustine develops an account of God’s grace and our willing that is at once starkly realistic about human limitations and hopeful about what God can do in and for the faithful, even in this life. While Augustine frankly forecasts that ongoing wrongful desires, painful curative procedures, and inner turmoil will be the norm, he also emphasizes that love eases these burdens, enabling genuine progress and human contributions. The resulting vision carries, rather than dissipates, the energy generated by the biblical friction between such realistic and optimistic assessments of God’s mercy at work in human life. In this sense, Augustine’s preaching on God’s grace and our willing is charged, never neutral.

While studies frequently concern preachers and their audiences, this chapter avoids the word “audience” and relies more upon the phrase that Augustine uses for the people who stand before him when he preaches: fratres mei (my brethren). The chapter first considers Augustine as preacher with a critical use of Possidius’s Life of Augustine. One of Augustine’s most devoted episcopal friends, Possidius knew him for nearly 40 years and heard him preach many times. The chapter then considers how Augustine understood the people before him. It treats how he spoke to them and how he allows us to glimpse something of who they are and how they think, with a focus on the descriptions of his people in ep. 29. Attending to this biography and letter can help us have a greater appreciation for the study of Augustine as a preacher and those with him when we focus on the extant sermon collection.

This chapter examines Augustine’s sermons given on the feasts of the Ascension and Pentecost. The homilies given on the Ascension highlight Augustine’s Christology, particularly the Ascension as disclosing Christ’s presence and the totus Christus. Augustine’s sermons on Pentecost and its vigil emphasize the unity of the church, imaged in the speaking of tongues in Acts 2, through the giving of the Holy Spirit. The sermons on Pentecost also unpack, through the image of the new wine and drunkenness in Acts 2, the newness and continuity of Pentecost as the fulfillment of the law in the Spirit’s gift of charity.

Augustine’s preaching touches numerous aspects of his theology which are predominantly present in his most important treatises. The sacraments of the Church are treated in his controversies with heretics but they are also very much present in his sermons, where he teaches the sound doctrine of the Church and performs the Christian rites for the edification of the faithful. This chapter examines Augustine’s teaching on baptism and the Eucharist in his preaching. Having considered his definition of the sacraments in general in his preached works, it presents his teaching on the sacraments in his catechesis to the baptism candidates and to the newly baptised Christians of his congregation. The study further takes into consideration what Augustine says on baptism and the Eucharist in his sermons while addressing the problems of the Donatists and Pelagians. Augustine makes difficult theological concepts understandable to his flock by adapting his language to them.

Bishop Augustine probably preached countless sermons on the New Testament, but less than three hundred remain extant. Most of his New Testament preaching is found in his 124 Homilies on the Gospel of John, his ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John, and his Sermons 51–183. The richness of these sermons is astounding. This chapter samples them, offering a starting point for further analysis. The first section focuses on the pastoral goals that stand behind Augustine’s preaching on the Gospel of Matthew. Second, the chapter turns to his anti-Donatist Homilies on the First Epistle of John, where he intersperses his commentary on 1 John with extensive citations of the Psalms and the Gospels. Third, with respect to his Homilies on the Gospel of John, the chapter shows that Augustine preaches on John with a strong eye to his central theological interests, including his well-known arguments regarding grace and predestination.

While the double love command permeates Augustine’s oeuvre, he develops it into a consistent pedagogy in his preaching. Augustine’s preaching locates the concomitant growth of love of God and love of neighbor within the whole Christ (totus Christus). He indicates to his hearers that the double love command actually involves three objects: God, neighbor, and the self. Augustine leads his hearers through a pattern of reflection concerning these loves: an articulation of the double love command, problematizing the love of self, relocating the self within the body of Christ, and the practical demands incurred by such a location for “neighbors” in Augustine’s and his hearers’ midst. The chapter pays particular attention to the way in which the parables of the prodigal son and the good Samaritan form conceptual markers for Augustine’s pedagogy. The result is a love of neighbor that includes family, friends, rivals, enemies, and the poor within the whole Christ.

This essay examines the sermons of St. Augustine (mainly nos. 184–96, ranging in date from 391 to 420) where he preaches on the nature as well as the effects of Christ’s birth. Augustine relates this revolutionary event to the festivities of January 1 as well as to the Solemnity of the Epiphany. As argued herein, Augustine’s homilies for each of these celebrations (1) stress how they fall and relate to the rest of the liturgical year, (2) focus on how the lowliness of God’s birth achieves humanity’s salvation, and (3) highlight Mary’s role in uniting heaven and earth.

The History of Mary Prince was the first account of the life of a Black woman to be published in the United Kingdom. Part of the avalanche of print culture that accompanied the transatlantic abolitionist movement, it has in recent years become an increasingly central text within pedagogy and research on Black history and literature, thanks to its vivid testimonies of Prince’s thoughts and feelings about her gendered experience of Caribbean slavery. Embracing and celebrating a growing international scholarly and general interest in African diasporic voices, texts, histories, and literary traditions, this Companion weds contributions from Romanticists, Caribbeanists, and Americanists to showcase the diversity of disciplinary encounters that Prince’s narrative invites, as well as its rich and troubled contexts. The first published collection on a single slave narrative or author, the volume is not only an authoritative, highly focused resource for students but also a model for future research.

The History of Mary Prince is a geographically layered narrative: The text transcribes Prince’s experiences of enslavement in the Caribbean from her birth in 1788 in Brackish Pond, Bermuda, to her harrowing labor on the salt industries on Grand Turk to her efforts to purchase her freedom in Antigua in the 1820s to her journey to London in 1828, where she continued her campaign for emancipation. Yet this chapter turns to The History to meditate on the methods we use for recovering Black geographies that may remain oblique in colonial archives. It argues that contemporary Black poets offer insights into Prince’s movements that may only exist as palimpsests within The History by speculating on her knowledge of Caribbean resistance movements, such as the Haitian Revolution and the Sunday Market Revolt in Antigua. By assembling this diachronic reading method, the chapter resists the impulse to achieve conclusive answers about Prince’s geographical relations but instead unfolds alternative possibilities for locating her in Black spaces.

This chapter considers The History of Mary Prince as an environmental history and demonstrates how Mary Prince theorized environmental justice from the perspective of an African descended woman who labored in the trenches of ecological imperialism and envisioned liberation. In studying Prince’s text, we can better understand how the interwoven systems of slavery and colonialism altered the natural world and also how imperialism, as a formalized ideological structure administered in the colonies as well as in the metropole, always left its imprint on the environment. The chapter argues that Prince demands a geography of freedom that is outside of the colonial-defined borders of the Caribbean islands, calling for an end to both slavery and ecological imperialism. In making this argument, it examines a series of vivid moments in Prince’s environmental history to catalogue Prince’s anti-imperialist geography. Further, this chapter also considers Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s theoretical neologism, tidalectics, as an entryway to comprehending Prince’s conceptualization of the marine landscapes of the islands she traversed.