On this day in 430, Saint Augustine died at the age of seventy-five. He had been Bishop of Hippo (now Annaba, Algeria) for thirty-four years, during which time he had become the patriarch of Christian Africa and one of the most influential leaders of the Latin Church. Much of Augustine's extensive writing has survived, The City of God and the Confessions being the most widely known. One of the first major contributions to the genre, the Confessions turns upon the 'born again' moment at the end of Book Eight, a passage during which a child helps Augustine give up his promising career as a pagan scholar-politician in Italy, and his weeping over his weakness for earthly delights ... FULL STORY »
