Speakers
His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros of America
His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros (Lambriniadis) of America, Most Honorable Exarch of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is the eighth Archbishop of America elected since the establishment of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in 1922. In March 2011, he was elected Metropolitan of Bursa, and in August of the same year was appointed Abbot of the Holy Patriarchal and Stavropegial Monastery of the Holy Trinity on the island of Halki. He has served as the Orthodox Secretary of the Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Lutheran World Federation and as a member of the Patriarchal delegations to the General Assemblies of the Conference of European Churches and the World Council of Churches. He was the Secretary of the Pan-Orthodox Synods in Sofia (1998), Istanbul (2005), Geneva (2006), and Istanbul (2008). He has been an active member of the World Council of Churches serving on its Central Committee and also serving on its Faith and Order Commission since 1996. On May 11, 2019, he was elected Archbishop of America by the Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and was enthroned at the Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in New York City on June 22 of the same year.
Fr. John Behr
Fr. John Behr is the Regius Professor of Humanity at the University of Aberdeen, since the summer of 2020, having taught at St. Vladimir’s Seminary since 1995, serving there as Dean from 2007–17. He is also a part- time Professor at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Holland.
His early work was on asceticism and anthropology, focusing on St. Irenaeus of Lyons and Clement of Alexandria (OUP 2000). He is writing a series of books on “The Formation of Christian Theology”, two volumes of which have already appeared: vol. 1, The Way to Nicaea (SVS Press 2001) and vol. 2 The Nicene Faith (SVS Press 2003). On the basis of these two volumes, he published a synthetic work, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (SVS 2006). This was followed by an edition and translation of the fragments of Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, setting them in their historical and theological context (OUP 2011).
More recently Fr. John published a more poetic and meditative work entitled Becoming Human: Theological Anthropology in Word and Image (SVS Press, 2013) and a full study of St. Irenaeus: St. Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity (OUP, 2013). Additionally, he has completed a new critical edition and translation of Origen’s On First Principles, together with an extensive introduction, for OUP (2017), and John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (OUP 2019). He has just completed a new edition and translation of On the Human Image of God (aka On the Making of Man) by Gregory of Nyssa. His next major project is a new edition and translation of the works of Irenaeus.