You teach at DePaul University and are a scholar-in-residence at St. Gregory's Hall. What is it that you teach at both of those places, and how did you come to teach it?
 
I'm an associate professor in the Catholic Studies department at DePaul, where I teach classes in Catholic Theology, Church History, and Religion and Literature. The scholarly work I do is primarily about early Christianity, specifically how folks in roughly the first seven centuries of the church interpreted the Bible and what that meant for the life of the Church.

St. Gregory's Hall has been awarded a Worshiping Communities Grant by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The grant will support a year-long project of developing the Sacred Music Program at St. Gregory's Hall.

With the help of composer-in-residence Kevin Allen, St. Gregory's Hall will use the grant to continue the work of promoting the Church's traditions of sacred music. Employed in the proper liturgical context, these traditions serve a valuable tool for prayer, worship, and living engagement with our Catholic faith.

​In addition to special choral liturgies offered for parishioners and the wider community throughout the year, the project will include a series of presentations on sacred music by Kevin Allen and guest speakers, and a weekend-long gregorian chant workshop for church musicians and parishioners tentatively planned for summer 2024.

Since it began in the year 2000, the Vital Worship, Vital Preaching Grants Program has awarded more than a thousand grants to churches, schools, organizations, and teacher-scholars across the United States and Canada for projects that generate thoughtfulness and energy for public worship and faith formation at the local grass-roots level. 

We are grateful to the Calvin Institute for Worship for their support of this project and look forward to continuing to expand our impact as a Catholic center for culture.​