At Lumen Verum Academy, we are privileged to be joined by Distinguished Guest Lecturers, who will be offering presentations to our students and parents throughout the academic year. This unique offering will give our students the opportunity not only to hear from renowned Catholic authors and speakers in their line of expertise, but furthermore to engage in dialogue with them through student-led question and answer sessions.
Electives Instructors
Dr. Charles Camosy, “Introduction to Bioethics”
Dr. Timothy O’Malley, “The Eucharist as Reality to Be Lived”
Mr. Harry Scherer, “Profiles in Virtue”
Student Presentations
Sr. Helena Burns, FSP
Br. Guy Consolmagno of the Vatican Observatory
Greg Dougherty, seminarian at Pope St. John XXIII National Seminary
Bill McCann, Director of THE LIBERATOR
Matthew Smith, artist at Myndful Mystic
Michael Ward, author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis
James Thomas Wilson, poet and professor at the University of St Thomas (Houston)
Parent Presentations
Abigail Favale, author of The Genesis of Gender
Electives Instructors
Charles Camosy, “Contemporary Threats to Human Dignity”
Student Presentations
Sisters of Life
Mike Aquilina, “St Joseph and the Angels”
Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg, “The Five Habits of an Excellent Scholar”
Chris Stefanick
Sarah Swafford, “Emotional Virtue for a Drama Free Life” (adolescent presentation)
Parent Presentations
Mike Aquilina, “St. Joseph and the Catholic Family”
Bill Bowman, “Saints, Scholars, and Social Media”
Jason Evert, “Parenting for Purity”
Colleen Richards, “An Introduction to Classical Liberal Arts Education”
Chris Stefanick, “The Joy of the Resurrection”
Sarah Swafford, “Emotional Virtue for a Drama Free Life” (parent presentation)
Dr. Karen Villa, “Mental Health and Growth in Virtue”
Jason Evert has traveled to six continents to bring the message of purity to more than one million people over the past 20 years, including World Youth Days in Australia, Spain, Poland, and Panama. He has also lectured at dozens of universities, including Harvard, Princeton, and the United States Air Force and Naval Academies. Jason earned a master’s degree in Theology, and undergraduate degrees in Counseling and Theology, with a minor in Philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville.
He is a best-selling author of 15 books, including Saint John Paul the Great, How to Find Your Soulmate without Losing Your Soul (Totus Tuus Press, 2011), and the curriculum YOU: Life, Love, and the Theology of the Body (Ascension Press, 2016). He and his wife Crystalina are frequent guests on radio programs throughout the country, and their television appearances include MSNBC, Fox News, the BBC, and EWTN. Together, they run Chastity Project and its website, chastity.com, and lead an international alliance of young people who promote purity in more than 40 countries.
Mary Rice Hasson is the Kate O’Beirne Fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. She also directs the Catholic Women’s Forum, a network of Catholic professional women and scholars seeking to amplify the voice of Catholic women in support of human dignity, authentic freedom, and Catholic social teaching.
Mary is an expert on topics related to women, faith, culture, family, sexual morality, and gender ideology. She has been a keynote speaker for the Holy See during the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women for the past three years, during which her talks included: “Gender Ideology: Ideological Aggression Against Women and Girls” (2019); “Valuing Unpaid Caregiving: The Human Dimension” (2019); “The Integral Education of Rural Women and Girls” (2018); and “The Distinctiveness of Women’s Work and Women’s Empowerment” (2017). Mary is a Consultant to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth.
Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie is a Policy Advisor for The Catholic Association. She writes and speaks in both Spanish and English about Catholicism, religious freedom, and the intersection of faith and science. As a Hispanic, she brings a special focus on social issues that affect the growing Latino population, such as the state of the family and the real needs of the poor and marginalized. As a physician, she is able to address complex subjects relating to government health policy and its true impact on the people it purports to help.
Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, CNN.com, National Review, FoxNews.com, US News and World Report, and The New York Times, among others. She has appeared on CNN, Telemundo, Fox News, C-SPAN, and EWTN.
In 2014 and 2015 she traveled to Rome to cover the Synod on the Family, commenting on its progress for many publications and shows. She was a featured speaker at the National March for Life in Washington, D.C., in January 2015, where she spoke about prenatal diagnosis. In 2017 and 2019, she was awarded Best Regular Column on Family Life from the Catholic Press Association. She is a regular columnist for US News and World Report and Angelus News.
Dr. Christie grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico, coming to the United States at the age of eleven. She is a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Miami School of Medicine.
Dr. Christie practices Radiology in the Miami area, where she lives with her husband and five children.
Chris Stefanick is an internationally acclaimed author and speaker, who has devoted his life to inspiring people to live a bold, contagious faith. Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap calls Chris, “one of the most engaging young defenders of the Christian faith on the scene today.”
Chris’s live seminars reach more than 85,000 people per year. His videos and radio spots reach more than 1,000,000 people per month, every month. And his educational initiatives are turning-the-tide in the Church. He authored what is being welcomed as the best Confirmation program in the English language: Chosen (Ascension Press, 2013). Already used by almost 100,000 teens per week, entire parishes are being transformed. As one Latino parish in Florida recently stated: “After starting Chosen, we have moved from losing 90% of our kids after Confirmation, to keeping 90%! Unprecedented.”
Chris is also the founder of Real Life Catholic, a Denver-based non-profit which operates as the headquarters for Chris’s various initiatives.
Above all, Chris is proud to be the husband to his wife Natalie and father to their six children.
Charlie Camosy grew up in the cornfields of Wisconsin, but he is now an Associate Professor of Theology at Fordham University in the Bronx, where he has taught since finishing his PhD in theology at Notre Dame in 2008. Among other places, his published articles have appeared in the American Journal of Bioethics, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Journal of the Catholic Health Association, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News and America magazine. He has a monthly “Purple Catholicism” column with Religion News Service and is the author of five books. Too Expensive to Treat? (Eerdmans) was a 2011 award-winner with the Catholic Media Association, Peter Singer and Christian Ethics (Cambridge) was named a 2012 “best book” with ABC Religion and Ethics, and For Love of Animals (Franciscan) was featured in the New York Times. Beyond the Abortion Wars (Eerdmans), was a 2015 award-winner, also with the Catholic Media Association. His most recent book, Resisting Throwaway Culture (New City), was published in May of 2019 and won first place from the Catholic Publishers Association as “Resource of the Year.” His most recent book, published in July 2021 (New City), is titled: Losing Our Dignity: How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality.
In addition to advising the Faith Outreach office of the Humane Society of the United States, the pro-life commission of the Archdiocese of New York, and the American Solidarity Party, Camosy received the Robert Bryne award from the Fordham Respect Life Club and received the 2018 St. Jerome Award for scholarly excellence from the Catholic Library Association. He has four children, three of whom he and his wife Paulyn adopted from a Filipino orphanage in June of 2016.