The idea of the project belongs to the Father and Head of our Church, His Beatitude Patriarch Sviatoslav. Whilst still the vice-rector of the L'viv Holy Spirit Seminary and associate professor of theology at Ukrainian Catholic University, he taught a course on theological anthropology and wrote a textbook, which is still being used by theological programs here in L'viv and in other Greek Catholic seminaries.
His Beatitude Sviatoslav reached out to the professors of the theology department of UCU and asked to expand existing chapters of the textbook, supplement it with new the current anthropological topics that were not covered previously, and to publish it in a form of a collective monograph, which will be useful to students, teachers and scholars of theological programs of the UGCC and in a wider academic community interested in the problems of biblical, patristic, and contemporary Christian anthropology. The publication will be based on the historical and theological approach proposed by His Beatitude Sviatoslav, and on the thematic discussion of contemporary trends in Christian anthropological thought, which seek answers to new challenges of nowadays. These two dimensions forms the structure of the publication, which will consist of the following clusters: foundations of the biblical anthropology (select anthropological topics of the Old and New Testaments), patristic sources of anthropology (anthropological ideas of authors of various Christian traditions of the first millennium), responses to anthropological questions in the second millennium (medieval approaches, Byzantine anthropology of the fourteenth century, specific features of the anthropology of the Kyiv theological tradition), the main theological trends in the study of human nature in contemporary Western and Eastern Christian traditions, theological personalism of the twentieth century, and anthropology of pope John Paul II. This project will have an international dimension, since its participants and partners are the scholars from UCU and UGCC, as well as professors from other European universities.
Sr. Ihnatia Gavrilyk, OSBM, lecturer at the Department of Theology at UCU