Atria A. Larson

Seasonal Study Weekend, August 12-13, 2016

Friday, Aug. 12, 7-9 pm

Saturday, Aug. 13, 9 am to Noon (8:15 am Breakfast)

Penance is a concept foreign to modern western values and a term rarely used, both in modern society and in the church. The Reformers of the sixteenth century rejected the practice and theology of the sacrament of penance – in fact, they rejected its identification as a sacrament – as it had developed over the previous millennium. Language of contrition, confession, and repentance remained part of their vocabulary, however, and many Reformed churches today include a communal and/or private “confession of sins” in their order of worship. Reformed Christians bristle at the idea of Roman Catholic penance, but few understand its historical development, both in doctrine and in practice, and few contemplate its role within church practice and society as a whole. The lectures of this Seasonal Study Weekend will examine various facets of the development of penance, beginning in the early church, moving through the medieval period, and ending with the Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation.

Atria A. Larson is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University. She has published numerous articles in the fields of medieval theology, canon law, and history in international journals as well as translations from German and from Latin. She is co-editor of A Companion to the Medieval Papacy: Growth of an Ideology and Institution, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 70 (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Her first book, Master of Penance: Gratian and the Development of Penitential Thought and Law in the Twelfth Century (Catholic University of America Press, 2014) was a winner of a 2015 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise from FIIT (Forschungszentrum für Internationale und Interdisziplinäre Theologie) at the Universität Heidelberg. She has edited and translated the treatise on penance that was the topic of that monograph. The volume, Gratian’s Tractatus de penitentia: A New Latin Edition with English Translation, was also released recently by CUA Press.