UD in Service: Ph.D. Students Share ‘Confessions’ in South Irving

Date published: March 15, 2019
Strengthening and enriching our communities, both local and global, is an important
part of living with a dedication to truth and virtue. We seek to nurture not only
our own families but also our human family. Both near and far, UD students, faculty
and alumni live out this commitment to truth, to virtue, and to humanity as a whole
in various acts of service, helping others to improve their lives and always improving
their own in the process. In “UD in Service” stories, we will explore these occasions
of hope, faith and inspiration.
UD students not only read St. Augustine’s Confessions in Rome, traveling to Ostia to marvel at the place in which, according to Book IX,
St. Augustine and his mother, St. Monica, had a joint mystical vision of God — they
also travel 4.4 miles from the Irving campus to read the text with residents of South
Irving.
For the 2018-2019 academic year, two doctoral students in philosophy have been leading
reading groups at St. Luke’s, a local Catholic parish. Many of its parishioners are
Hispanic immigrants, so the groups have been conducted in both English and Spanish.
Each participant received a free copy of the Confessions. Once a month the two groups of 10 have been meeting to work their way through Augustine’s
masterpiece.
Kimberly Heil leads the English-speaking group.
“Reading the challenging writing of St. Augustine with these parishioners is a fruitful
and exhilarating experience,” she said. “They bring an eagerness to grow in knowledge
and faith to their reading and to our discussions.”
Pavel Jimenez-Vazquez leads the Spanish-speaking group.
“I am very thankful for this opportunity to share off campus some of the formation
that we receive at UD,” he said. “Perhaps the most compelling thing for me is that
the attendees are fully engaged with the idea of having an intellectual formation
as Catholics. Augustine is definitely enlightening their paths in seeking the truth.”
The reading groups are the result of a one-time community outreach grant from the
American Catholic Philosophical Association. They are administered by the graduate
director of the M.A. in philosophy program, Associate Professor of Philosophy Chad
Engelland, Ph.D.
“Augustine said that truth can only be had in being given away,” said Engelland. “As
every teacher knows, the same is true of a great book like the Confessions.”