Registration opens in August!
Join us for Divina Eloquia: The Pastoral Theology of the Church!
The recent publication, The Pastoral Theology of the Early Church (CUA Press, 2026), makes a case for how the wisdom of the early Church can inform and inspire pastoral ministry today. A self-professed son of St. Augustine, Pope Leo XIV has given us an example of how this is done through his preaching and teaching, where the Fathers are featured prominently. In this lecture, Fr. Andrew Summerson introduces themes from this recent volume in order to shed light on how Pope Leo draws influence from the patristic past to lead the contemporary church.
Fr. Andrew Summerson is the Academic Director of the Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies and Associate Professor of Greek Patristics at the University of St. Michael’s College. He is the author of Divine Scripture and Human Emotion in Maximus the Confessor (Brill 2021) and co-editor of Eastern Catholic Theology in Action (Catholic University of America Press, 2024) as well as The Pastoral Theology of the Early Church (Catholic University of America Press, 2026). A Byzantine Catholic priest since 2015 and teenage convert, you can read his conversion and vocation story in By Strange Ways: Theologians and Their Paths to the Catholic Church (Ignatius Press, 2022). His collaborates on a variety of pastoral projects with his wife, Laura Ieraci, a Catholic journalist.