Professor of theology and executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John’s University (SJU) in Collegeville, Minnesota, Columba Stewart, OSB, writes on early Christian monasticism and monastic spirituality. He is an ordained Roman Catholic priest and a monk of Saint John’s Abbey. Dr. Stewart graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and earned a master’s degree in religious studies from Yale University. After further graduate study in the School of Theology at SJU, he took a D.Phil. in theology at Oxford University in 1989. He returned to SJU as an assistant professor of theology and was appointed a full professor in 2001. As executive director of HMML since 2003, he has led a major initiative to digitize endangered Christian manuscripts in the Middle East, Ukraine, and South India. Dr. Stewart has studied at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem as a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellow and this year has been awarded a second NEH fellowship and a Dumbarton Oaks Research Library fellowship for a study of the origins and development of monastic culture in the Christian East. A member of the editorial board of Spiritus, he has published numerous articles in scholarly journals or in volumes of collected works and is the author of Working the Earth of the Heart: The Messalian Controversy in History, Texts, and Language to 431 (1991) and two books published in 1998 – Cassian the Monk (Oxford University Press), a study of the life, writings, and spiritual theology of a founder of the Latin monastic movement, and Prayer and Community: The Benedictine Tradition (Darton, Longman and Todd and Orbis Books), an overview of Benedictine spirituality that focuses both on the Rule of Benedict and the lived experience of monastic communities during the ensuing centuries.
