Brown University

Petteruti Lounge in the Stephen Robert '62 Campus Center

7:00 PM

A lecture by Fr. Dominic Langevin, OP (Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception)

Free and open to the public.

Speaker Bio: 

Fr. Langevin entered the Order of Friars Preachers in 1998 and was ordained a priest in 2005. He was previously assigned as a parochial vicar at St. Thomas Aquinas University Parish in Charlottesville, Virginia, serving the University of Virginia. While working on his doctorate at the University of Fribourg, Father Langevin was employed full-time there as the assistant to the Chair of Dogmatic Theology for Ecclesiology and the Sacraments. Father Langevin joined the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in the fall of 2013. He teaches courses in sacramental theology and liturgiology. He is the book review editor of the journal The Thomist. His book, From Passion to Paschal Mystery (Academic Press Fribourg, 2015), analyzes 20th-century Church teaching on the relationship between the sacraments (focusing on baptism and the Eucharist) and the events of Christ’s life. His primary research interest is general sacramental theology.

Lecture Description:

Jesus gave to his Church and her pastors “the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (see Matthew 16:19). One use of these keys is the sacrament of penance or confession, a sacrament for the forgiveness of postbaptismal sin. This lecture will explore (1) the roots of the sacrament in Christ’s ministry of reconciliation, (2) the living and understanding of this sacrament in the first centuries of Christianity, and (3) how the sacrament retains its value and vitality today.