Curated playlist
Church Fathers
- IrenaeusIrenaeus was a Greek bishop who, around the year 180, sat down to dismantle a rival vision of Christianity that promised secret wisdom to a chosen few. His weapon was a book whose full title runs On the Detection and Overthrow of the…
- TertullianQuintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, writing from Carthage around the turn of the third century, asked a question that still echoes through the history of Western thought: "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" That single line…
- EusebiusEusebius of Caesarea died on the 30th of May AD 339, and what he chose not to write may matter as much as what he did. In one of his own works he warns that he will relate nothing about the martyrs of his time except the things in which he…
- OrigenOrigen of Alexandria was, by any measure, one of the most restless minds the ancient world produced. He wrote roughly 2,000 treatises over a lifetime that ended not in a library but in a prison cell, where he was held in an iron collar…
- Augustine of HippoAugustine of Hippo was born on the 13th of November 354 in Thagaste, a small town in Roman North Africa that today is Souk Ahras, Algeria. He died on the 28th of August 430 as the Vandals were laying siege to his city. In the seventy-five…
- Clement of AlexandriaClement of Alexandria spent years wandering the ancient world before he ever arrived in Alexandria. Born around 150 AD under the full Roman name Titus Flavius Clemens, he had grown up in a pagan household and rejected that faith as a young…
- John ChrysostomJohn Chrysostom collapsed and died at Comana Pontica on the 14th of September 407, on a road he never chose to walk. He was being marched toward Pitiunt, a remote outpost on the far edge of the empire, having already been banished twice…
- Basil of CaesareaBasil of Caesarea once told a prefect of the emperor, "Perhaps you have never yet had to deal with a bishop." The prefect, a man named Modestus, had been sent by the Emperor Valens to force a compromise with the Arian faction. He later…
- Gregory of NyssaGregory of Nyssa wrote something no one in the ancient world had written before him: a direct, unequivocal argument that slavery itself was sinful. Not cruel slavery. Not mismanaged slavery. All of it. This was the fourth century, when the…
- Gregory of NazianzusGregory of Nazianzus once compared himself to the Prophet Jonah, begging to be thrown overboard. "Seize me and throw me," he told a council of 150 bishops in 381, offering to sacrifice his own office for the sake of unity. He was, by then,…
- Church FathersThe Church Fathers wrote letters, sermons, and philosophical treatises that would shape the beliefs of billions of people across two millennia. Some were bishops. Some were monks. One was a court secretary who gave up politics for a…
- LactantiusLactantius, born Lucius Caecilius Firmianus around the year 250, came from Berber stock in North Africa and rose to become one of the most celebrated Latin stylists of the early Christian world. He wound up as an advisor to the Roman…
- JeromeJerome, the early Christian priest and scholar also known as Saint Jerome, once described crawling through the catacombs beneath Rome. He wrote of crypts dug deep in the earth, their walls lined on either side with the bodies of the dead,…