St. Augustine is perhaps the most significant Christian thinker after St. Paul. Often pictured by Western painters holding in his hand his heart blazing with passionate love, he consistently and repeatedly insisted―from his earliest writings until close to his death―that the essential characteristic of God is love. Yet he also insisted on the doctrines of original sin and everlasting punishment for the damned. How did he reconcile this apparent contradiction? And can it bring us any closer to understanding a God seemingly indifferent to human suffering?

Margaret Miles is the Emerita Professor of Historical Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where she also served as Dean for six years. She was the first tenured woman at Harvard University Divinity School, where she taught from 1978 to 1996. The author of more than twenty-five books, she has studied Augustine for over fifty years, and while deep in writing her latest and perhaps last book, Beautiful Bodies, she joins Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation about some of her exciting findings.

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About the Guest

Margaret R. Miles is Emerita Professor of Historical Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She was Bussey Professor of Theology and the first tenured woman at Harvard University Divinity School from 1978 to 1996, and Dean of GTU from 1996 until her retirement in 2002. Recent books include both research books and books that explore a problem that is both personal and social: Reading Augustine: On Memory, Marriage, Tears and Meditation, Augustine and The Fundamentalist's Daughter, Getting Here From There (with Hiroko Sakomura), The Wendell Cocktail, and The Long Goodbye: Dementia Diaries.

About the Moderator

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young is the dean of Grace Cathedral. He is the author of The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau and The Invisible Hand in Wilderness: Economics, Ecology, and God, and is a regular contributor on religion to the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner.

About The Forum

The Forum is a series of stimulating conversations about faith and ethics in relation to the important issues of our day. We invite inspiring and illustrious people to sit down for a real conversation with the Forum's host and with you. Our guests range from artists, inventors and philosophers to pop culturists and elected officials, but the point of The Forum is singular: civil, sophisticated discourse that engages minds and hearts to think in new ways about the world.