His adventures certainly defy the conventional notion of monastic life as sedentary and quiet. “It’s a weird situation,” Stewart acknowledges in a Zoom call as he sits at his desk in the library in Minnesota during an enforced break from travel during the pandemic. “Sometimes I feel like a war correspondent. Other times I’m cast in a religious role. In northern Iraq, I’ll be in my habit at Mass with 1,500 worshipers chanting in Aramaic. Then I’ll be going around in a tank.” Mementos on his shelves provide glimpses of his globe-trotting life: a United Nations pass from Timbuktu, photos of Stewart with Pope Francis, a Hezbollah charm bracelet.Father Columba Stewart is well known to my regular readers as one of the Manuscripts Men who saved countless Syriac and other manuscripts from the ravages of ISIS during the war some years ago. As you will see, he has not been idle since. Not even in the pandemic. For more on Father Stewart and on the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML), see here, here, and here and links.
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