In April, Dr. Erika Kidd presented “Augustine the Teacher” for the annual Thought & Culture Lecture. Based on her recent book, Intimacy and Intelligibility: Word and Life in Augustine’s De magistro (University of Notre Dame Press, October 2025), Kidd shared that Saint Augustine has a lot to say about teaching.
He writes memorably in his Confessions about the way his early teachers failed him, teaching him to love praise and worldly success. He writes, too, about the vocation of the teacher, insisting that teaching is not a matter of passing along information but rather an invitation to attend to the voice of Christ.
In addition to the spring lecture at St. Thomas, Kidd has presented her newly published work to audiences across the country, including Villanova University’s Patristics, Medieval, Renaissance Conference in October 2025; the Lumen Christi Institute’s West Suburban Catholic Culture Series in November 2025; Baylor University’s Institute for Faith and Learning in March 2026; and the National Catholic Education Association’s National Conference in Minneapolis in April 2026.
Praise For Dr. Kidd’s Newest Publication
“It is almost miraculous that a work as well-known as Augustine’s De magistro should successfully undergo a fresh and radical reinterpretation, yet Erika Kidd has done precisely that. She has single-handedly changed the conversation about this dialogue: Scholars will be coming to terms with her thesis for generations.”
- Michael Foley, professor of patristics and assistant director of university scholars in the Honors College at Baylor University
“Philosopher Erika Kidd’s slender but brilliant new book, Intimacy and Intelligibility, points us back to Augustine’s own attraction towards abstraction and away from incarnation. What Kidd offers is a better vision of human communication – one that Augustine discovered 1,600 years ago, in conversation with his son. She sheds light on the distinctive problems of our own time and shows how to inhabit a better discourse.”
- Terence Sweeney ’20 CSMA, assistant teaching professor in the Department of Humanities and the Honors Program, Villanova University
“Intimacy and Intelligibility is a slim, lovely book exploring St. Augustine’s De magistro (On the Teacher). De magistro is a dialogue between St. Augustine and his son, Adeodatus, as they wrestle with the question of whether it is possible to teach anyone anything. Many parents, perhaps, have wondered this in a moment of frustration. But Augustine and Adeodatus, and Kidd, are deeply interested in how an idea can be communicated from person to person, and how conversation knits us together.”
- Leah Libresco Sargeant, author and speaker
This story is featured in the summer 2026 issue of Lumen.
