Marie-Ange Rakotoniaina, a liturgical scholar whose work focuses on early Christianity, received a Ph.D. in religion from Emory University in 2020. She returns for a second fellowship year to Yale, where she is currently working on a book project (tentatively) titled Of Heart and Time: The Sabbath in the Age of Augustine. Her fellowship project explores how Augustine’s preaching on the subject of the Sabbath opens new possibilities of religious devotion. Her investigation of various metaphors of the spiritual Sabbath in relation to devotional practices in their liturgical contexts—from fragrance to musical instruments used in psalmist worship or the changing performance of Augustine’s congregations, from memory to desire, from sanctification to obedience—reveals how the practice of the Sabbath finds an original place within the private landscape of the heart.
