Dick Franklin Memorial Lecture

Converting to Christianity in Late Antiquity: What we can learn from Augustine of Hippo – Dr Katie Chambers. . She teaches at UNE in History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies and is a specialist on the thought of Augustine of Hippo, especially his moral and political thought and its reception in the Middle Ages and Modern Era. Her latest publication is Augustine on the Nature of Virtue and Sin (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

This talk looks at how ‘conversion’ has been understood in the past and the present. It discusses some models of conversion in religious studies and asks about their relationship to late antiquity conversion narratives. Conversion is the process by which a person changes their convictions, abandoning old beliefs and adopting new ones. In a world of increasingly polarised opinions about things like global heating, women’s rights and geopolitics, the issue of conversion remains as relevant as ever.

What can we learn from late antiquity about what is involved in converting from one set of beliefs to another? This talk seeks to shed light on this question by looking at Augustine of Hippo, perhaps the most famous Christian convert after Saint Paul. I offer a new reading of his description of his conversion to Christianity in the garden in Milan, found in his autobiographical writing, ‘Confessions’.

The Dick Franklin Memorial Lecture commemorates Richard L. ‘Dick’ Franklin (1925-2015), an academic philosopher, a committed Christian and dedicated Anglican layman. He was deeply interested in the life of the mind, the articulation of faith, and the ways in which faith informs living and learning. His last major book completed in the weeks before his death was “Is God finished? The Impact of Science and Secularism on Our Thinking and Our Living”.