Irenei (Steenberg)
Discerning the Unity of the Church. St Irenaeus and the Early Christian Tradition
Matthew Craig Steenberg was born in 1978 on the American Naval Base in Okinawa (Japan) where he lived the first year of his life before moving to the United States. At university, he majored in Classics and Religion. Afterwards, he obtained a Masters Degree and then Doctorate in Patristic Studies and Church History from the University of Oxford. He became a teaching Fellow of Religion at Oxford, a post he held until 2007, when he became Chair and Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Leeds Trinity University, a post which he held until 2010.
In 2010, he moved to the USA, where he was tonsured a monk with the name Irenaeus, then ordained a priest by Archbishop Kyrill of San Francisco and Western America.
On March 2010, he became a Visiting Professor in Orthodox Christian Studies, Santa Clara University. Since 2011, he was the Dean and Founder of the Sts Cyril & Athanasius Institute for Orthodox Studies. In 2016, the Synod of Bishops of ROCOR (Russian orthodox church outside Russia) elected him to be the Bishop of Sacramento and Vicar of the Western American Diocese.
Professor Bishop Irenei’s scholarly work centres on patristic theology, especially anthropology in the Orthodox patristic tradition. In 2000, he had established the website, Monachos.net, dedicated to "Orthodoxy through Patristics, Monastic, and Liturgical Study", while in 2008 he began weekly internet radio broadcasts for Ancient Faith Radio, in a series called A Word From the Holy Fathers.