From Chat GPT, 8/2026
https://stjohnsem.academia.edu/LukeDysinger/CurriculumVitae
(Full CV above)
(AI report below)
Fr. Luke Dysinger is an unusually accomplished combination: Benedictine monk and priest, retired family physician, Oxford-trained scholar of early Christianity, and Catholic bioethicist.
He earned a BA in religion from USC in 1974 and an MD there in 1978. He completed family-medicine training through UCLA and Antelope Valley Hospital, became board-certified, and practiced medicine until 1994.
He joined St. Andrew’s Abbey at Valyermo in 1980, made solemn profession in 1985, and was ordained in 1986. He has served as novice master, junior master, prior, librarian and cantor. He says he entered because the community made common liturgical prayer its “central and most important work.” St. Andrew’s Abbey biography
At Oxford he received a theology certificate and later a DPhil in theology/patristics in 2000.
He is professor of Church History and Moral Theology at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo and has chaired its theology department. He has also taught biomedical ethics and served for many years on the Antelope Valley Hospital bioethics committee. St. John’s Seminary biography
His principal scholarly specialty is Evagrius Ponticus, the psychologically perceptive fourth-century Desert Father whose “eight tempting thoughts” eventually evolved into the Seven Deadly Sins. Dysinger’s substantial Oxford University Press monograph, Psalmody and Prayer in the Writings of Evagrius Ponticus (2005), examines chanting and memorized Scripture as spiritual medicine. In 2024 he was one of five scholars responsible for a major new Oxford translation, Evagrius of Pontus: The Gnostic Trilogy—a genuine scholarly achievement, presenting the whole trilogy from surviving Greek and Syriac versions. 2005 book · 2024 Oxford volume
His other major field is Catholic medical ethics—end-of-life care, assisted suicide, reproductive ethics, sexuality and celibacy. His published positions are squarely within Catholic moral teaching, but informed by actual medical training and clinical experience. One example is his discussion of sterilization in the AMA Journal of Ethics.
He also maintains an enormous, decidedly old-fashioned but remarkably rich online collection of courses and primary texts, much of it freely available. He regularly leads Abbey retreats on lectio divina, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Benedictine spirituality and contemplative practice.
In short, he appears to be a serious and respected scholar—not merely a retreat lecturer—with an especially rare capacity to connect medicine, psychology, bioethics and ancient monastic spirituality. “Physician–monk–Oxford patristics scholar” is a fairly remarkable résumé.
