Guest Lecture for T8581A Church Fathers: An Introduction

On Tuesday 31 March 2015, Dr Dimitri Kepreotes offered a lecture on 'Patristic Paideia' for T8581A Church Fathers: An Introduction. Protopresbyter Dr Doru Costache, who manages the course unit and who extended the invitation, shared the following thoughts after the event:

"With great skill and in a very engaging fashion, Dimitri contributed an erudite talk on Christian paideia and its Platonic antecedents. Together with relevant passages from Plato, he illustrated the purpose of Christian paideia by beautiful texts from two Church fathers, St Photios of Constantinople and St Nicodemus the Athonite. The students and I have been introduced to a marvellous world, for which the human person and its holistic formation, not utilitarian considerations, constitute the centre of the whole educational and/or civilisational process.

Personally, I yearn with deep nostalgia for an educational system where the person and its wellbeing are the goal, a system where there is neither confusion between nor superseding of the aspects of training and formation. Dimitri managed precisely that, to vividly evoke, through well chosen paradigms from the three authors, the features of a noble world where the entire energy of the educators is invested in the making of a perfect, even holy, human being and not the reduction of the latter to a tool within the anonymous mechanisms of contemporary 'civilised' societies. It has been a great, inspiring lecture and Dimitri wholly deserves the gratitude of the students and my own."