We are delighted to announce that Research Associate Dr Luigi Gioia has been appointed full time VHI Development Officer as part of our current major campaign to ensure a long and sustainable future for our unique research institute.
Over the past 20 years, Luigi has been actively involved in a variety of different contexts: academia (Oxford, the Pontifical University of S. Anselmo in Rome, and Cambridge), pastoral (as novice master in France and abbot in Italy), administrative (as director of the library in S. Anselmo) and organizational (as creator and academic director of the course on Leadership and the Rule of St Benedict). This has acquainted him with the various Catholic contexts in many European countries: France, UK, USA, Italy, Germany and Switzerland. Moreover, especially since 2011, he has given many academic talks and preached retreats in Korea, China, Philippines, Ghana, Australia, Canada and USA. These experiences have considerably expanded his knowledge of the contemporary Catholic scenes all over the world. In several of these contexts he has actively worked to raise funds for the activities entrusted to him.
Luigi Gioia also has an inside knowledge of both Oxford and Cambridge Universities and their collegiate system. Besides his five years in Oxford, he spent 2016-17 as a visiting scholar at the Divinity Faculty in Cambridge working on a monograph exploring language and desire in Augustine and Merleau-Ponty. He has been connected with four colleges (Christ Church and St Benet’s Hall in Oxford, Magdalene and St Edmunds in Cambridge)
Besides his academic works, Luigi Gioia has written several books of spirituality in Italian and in English aimed at a broad readership. A book on prayer is about to be published by Bloomsbury this coming November which has been chosen as the Archbishop of Canterbury Lent Book for 2018.
The VHI Director, Philip McCosker, writes of the appointment ‘I am absolutely delighted that Luigi Gioia has been appointed to the VHI development role after an extensive international search. His wide range of experiences makes him a perfect fit for this unique position. I very much look forward to working with him intensively this year to continue to work for a transformative and long future for the VHI’.
Luigi Gioia writes, ‘It is a great honour for me to be able to work for such a well established and exciting Institute embedded within the only Oxbridge College with a Catholic heritage and outlook. I greatly look forward to working with Dr McCosker. I fully share his far-reaching vision for the future of the VHI which I have been able to appreciate during my year as a research associate of the Institute. The VHI is in a privileged position to enrich the social and cultural outreach of Catholicism and to deepen its own self-understanding in an active and fruitful dialogue with academia’.
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