Deacon Christopher Roberts, Ph.D.
Deacon Roberts lives in Chestnut Hill with his wife Hannah and their four daughters. He is chairman of the board and the president of Martin Saints Classical High School. He is a permanent deacon at Our Mother of Consolation parish.
Chris is a convert who grew up in Baltimore. Chris and Hannah met when they were both theology students at Oxford University in England. Hannah is from a small village in North Yorkshire, England. Chris and Hannah were married at Ampleforth Abbey, a Benedictine school and monastery also in Yorkshire. As an adult, Hannah worked for poor churches in the East End of London to help them restore their buildings. More recently, Hannah has helped teach the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, as well as homeschooling the Roberts daughters. She and her friend Betsy Puntel wrote a book together, A Child's Book of the Mass, in order to help both adults and children understand the liturgy more deeply.
The Roberts family moved to Philadelphia in 2005 so that Chris could teach in the Ethics Program at Villanova University. Chris has also worked for the Collegium Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. Pope Francis awarded him the Benemerenti Medal for being the primary writer and editor of Love is Our Mission: the family fully alive, which was the official catechism for the 2015 World Meeting of Families.
Chris also wrote a book called Creation and Covenant: the significance of sexual difference in the moral theology of marriage (you can read a review here). Earlier in his career, he was a reporter for the PBS television program Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.
Chris is a graduate of Yale (BA, Religious Studies and Environmental Studies), Oxford (MPhil, Christian Ethics) and the University of London (PhD, Theology). He also received a further MA in theology from Philadelphia's St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in 2017.
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