St. Francis College hosted the Northeast Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature November 8 and 9 which featured the lecture, ’The Most Foul Buffoon’: Some Early English Responses to Luther,” delivered by Dr. Patrick Hornbeck.

Dr. Hornbeck studied at Georgetown University and the University of Oxford, where he received his D.Phil. in Theology and Ecclesiastical History. Since graduating from Oxford in 2007, Dr. Hornbeck has been teaching at Fordham University, where he is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Theology Department.

Dr. Hornbeck’s scholarly work focuses on the interplay between the shifting categories of “heresy” and “orthodoxy” in medieval and early modern Christianity. His long-standing interests in the categories of heresy and dissent recently led him to begin developing a new specialization in the area of marginalized practices and identities in contemporary American Roman Catholicism. In this area, he has received grants to study both the theological, psychological, and sociological processes through which Roman Catholics move from affiliation and engagement with the Catholic Church to disaffiliation and disengagement; and the legal, ethical, and theological dimensions of the relationship between lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons and the American Catholic Church.

His first book, What Is a Lollard?: Dissent and Belief in Late Medieval England, was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. His current scholarly projects include an extensive, interview-based study of deconversion in contemporary American Roman Catholicism, and also an online effort to digitize and make publicly available the writings of John Wyclif.