Chad Pecknold’s Twitter course on Augustine's City of God was publicized in several outlets including Crux, National Review, CatholicVote.org, and the Washington Examiner. See below.
From: Crux Date: Jan. 10, 2017
Author: Kathryn Jean Lopez
Chad C. Pecknold, a theology professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., who's starting a 15-week course on St. Augustine's The City of God via Twitter, says reading the challenging tome isn't hard work but "better quality play."
Read more about Pecknold's expertise.
From: National Review Date: Jan. 11, 2017
Author: Kathryn Jean Lopez
Tomorrow, Chad C. Pecknold, a professor at the Catholic University of America, begins an experiment: a seminar over Twitter on St. Augustine's City of God. ( We talk a bit about it here.) You can join the discussion at @CCPecknold Thursday night at 8 P.M. EST.
From: Catholic Vote Date: Jan. 9, 2017
Author: Joshua Mercer
Dr. Chad Pecknold is associate professor of systematic theology at Catholic University of America, and he also provides great insights on politics from his Twitter account @ccpecknold. He spoke briefly with Josh Mercer, Editor of CatholicVote's daily newsletter, The Loop.
From: Washington Examiner Date: Jan. 9, 2017
Author: C.C. Pecknold
... There's a great risk that our political future will be like the film "Groundhog Day" as if it were centered around 2016. But the country is also going through some fundamental transformations, and so is Western civilization itself. Orestes Brownson once saw our country's destiny as "continuing and completing" Rome, reiterating the idea that Rome never falls, it's only ever born anew.
Whether we can go that far with Brownson or not, we can at least acknowledge that the United States is partly built on a memory of an older western dynamic. ...
From: National Review Date: Feb. 6, 2017
Author: Kathryn Jean Lopez
... Chad Pecknold, a professor of theology at my alma mater, the Catholic University of America, had the idea to conduct a 15-week seminar over Twitter on a book he was teaching this semester anyway. Of course, a classroom is one thing; social media, very much another. But sure enough, as I got myself to Twitter on that first Thursday night, a father announced he had put his kids to bed and was ready, a federal judge weighed in with his insights, and all sorts of people from varied backgrounds shared their favorite quotes from the first chapters of City of God, and made connections to politics and religion and culture today. ...From: Catholic StandardDate: Feb. 13, 2017
Author: Kelly Seegers
Students in professor Chad Pecknold's newest class at The Catholic University of America come from Canada, Uruguay, France, Germany, England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, and all across the United States, but two things unite them all - a printed copy of St. Augustine's City of God and their Twitter accounts.Pecknold, who teaches a doctoral seminar on St. Augustine's City of God at Catholic University, decided on a whim at the beginning of the semester to post the reading schedule for his seminar on his personal Twitter account, and invite people to read along and have an occasional discussion. Expecting about a dozen people to respond, Pecknold was shocked to find that thousands of people showed interest in doing this online study of Augustine.As of Jan. 18, about 120,000 people had viewed his invitation, and more than 2,000 had committed to buying the book and reading along. Pecknold had to quickly figure out how to accommodate such a large volume of people, and decided to dedicate a two-hour period on Thursday evenings from 8-10 p.m. to the study of City of God.
During his first class, which was held on Jan. 12, Pecknold sat down with several different translations of the book, which had all of his hand-written marginal notes from about a decade of teaching the text. He tweeted out his commentary on book one through the Twitter app on his iPhone, and since Book 1 is 33 chapters, he wrote about 150 tweets in two hours. His students either replied to his tweets or composed their own, using the class's hash tag #CivDei to add their own commentary to the discussion. The hash tag is taken from the original Latin title of the text, De Civitate Dei. ...