Sarah Ruden holds a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town and has been a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project, an education-enrichment nonprofit in Cape Town. She was a scholar in residence for three years at Yale Divinity School and a Guggenheim fellow and is now a visiting scholar at Brown University. In the fall of 2016, she received the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for her work on Augustine's
Confessions.
Ruden made use of her experience in publishing several book-length translations of pagan literature to write
Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (Pantheon, 2010). Her translation of Aeschylus'
Oresteia is part of
The Greek Plays, a Modern Library collection (2016). She has begun a new translation of the Gospels for
The Modern Library, taking into account linguistic, literary, and historical research that has been poorly represented in standard translations.
On this program, we talk about her
new translation of Augustine's Confessions, published by
The Modern Library in June 2017.
Publishers Weekly has called it "delightfully readable while still densely theological. In this lively translation filled with vivid, personal prose, Ruden introduces readers to a saint whom many will realize they only thought they knew."
Garrett Brown has been the host of New Books in Biblical Studies since April 2015. He works as a book publisher and occasionally blogs at noteandquery.com.