Columba Stewart, OSB
Father Columba Stewart, OSB, is the executive director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library. Fr. Columba holds an AB in History and Literature from Harvard College, MA in Religious Studies from Yale University and DPhil from the University of Oxford, England, writing his thesis on Greek and Syriac asceticism. He professed vows as a Benedictine monk of Saint John's Abbey in 1982, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1990. In 1989, he joined the faculty of the graduate School of Theology and undergraduate Department of Theology at Saint John’s University. He has published extensively in his research field of early Christian monasticism. Fr. Columba was named by the NEH as the 2019 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. Fr. Columba has been featured on many national and international media outlets, including 60 Minutes, BBC World News, PBS’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly as well as in The Economist, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal.
