I'd like to welcome everyone here this evening.

On behalf of the Pontifical faculty, I'm Father Thomas White, and it's good to have you all here.

Since we're a little smaller crowd, I'm going to permit myself a little bit of a theological introduction of our speaker tonight.

In 1988, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger came to New York for what has become a famous

seminar event at the Institute for Religion and Public Life under the auspices of Richard

Newhouse and had a conversation with a lot of important exegetes about the future of Catholic exegesis.

And he famously outlined in that speech the notion of exegesis C, that the church had her own

tradition of exegesis, which he called A, from the fathers of the church in the scholastics,

that exegesis B was historical critical exegesis elaborated since the time of the Enlightenment,

and that what the church needs to do today is articulate unity of modern historical reason and traditional faith in what he called the exegesis C.

And in his own books on Jesus, as Benedict XVI, he went on to elaborate his version of that.

A young scholar at that time who's's speaking tonight, Professor Gregory Vol, took deep

inspiration from that lecture. He is originally a graduate of Steubenville and was

studied for his doctorate in Sacred Scripture at the Catholic University of America.

He has apprenticed himself in many ways to Father Francis Martin, who many of us know here well,

who also conducts a tradition of deep theological inquiry into scripture using historical critical methods.

A professor of all went on to teach theology.

He's now professor of theology at Ave Maria University and, in fact, chair of the department

and director of the PhD program there.

He is the author of many profound theological articles on scripture, including a couple

have been published in the Thomist.

He has a major new work published last year from Catholic University Press,

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