Scholar-Priest to preach at Union Chapel on Sunday
BY SHELBY MAMDANI
This Sunday, August 14, marks the 75th annual memorial service for the Garden Club of Shelter Island, a tradition begun in 1936.
Father Michael Suarez, university professor of English and director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, will preach at Union Chapel’s service of worship this Sunday, at 10:30 a.m.
The service will honor the work of the Shelter Island Garden Club and remember members who passed away during the previous year. President Jean Brechter will lead club members and the congregation in remembrances of William H. Price Jr. The altar flowers will be arranged by Carolyn Stromberg, winner of the Tricolor Award at the club’s 2011 Daffodil Show.
A native New Yorker, Michael Suarez was born in Manhattan, raised in Manhasset and attended Xavier High School. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1982, and, after 12 years of study and training, was ordained in 1994. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Bucknell University, majoring in biology, English and sociology, he was president of the student body, and upon graduation, a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University.
While a student at Oxford, he garnered first-class academic honors, was awarded the Sir Roger Newdigate Prize for Poetry, and won a coveted Oxford Blue as captain of the university lacrosse team and co-captain of England Lacrosse World Cup Selection Squad (South).
He holds two bachelor’s degrees, four master’s degrees (two each in English and theology) and a doctorate from Oxford, where he taught on the faculty of English Language and Literature from 1995 to 2009. Between 1999 and 2009, he had a split academic appointment between Oxford and New York, holding the J. A. Kavanaugh Chair of English at Fordham University.
“I loved my Oxford-Fordham life,” he remarked, “but the opportunity to lead the world’s premier institute for the study of books, manuscripts and born-digital materials was simply too good to pass up.”
The holder of research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, he co-edited “The Oxford Companion to the Book” (2010), a million-word reference work on the history of books and manuscripts from the invention of writing to the present day. The Sunday Telegraph in London called it “colossal” and “a paradise for book lovers”; while the Wall Street Journal praised it as “a fount of knowledge where the Internet is but a slot machine.” Among his current scholarly projects is an eight-volume collected works of the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
His pastoral labors have included chaplaincies at Riker’s Island and Rosalie Hall, a home for unwed teenage mothers in the Bronx; work in the Dominican Republic; and 14 years in an Oxfordshire parish. He is presently a pastoral associate at Holy Comforter Roman Catholic Church in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“I am delighted to be coming to Shelter Island,” said Father Suarez; “I had the pleasure of presiding at a wedding at Our Lady of the Isle several years ago and was taken by the tremendous beauty of the place. I’m honored to be delivering this sermon, but I’m also looking forward to running on the beach and getting some swimming in too.”
Music by Tchaikovsky at Sunday’s service will be provided by Caroline Ruby on French horn, accompanied by Chapel organist Linda Betjeman.
The Garden Club will host a reception in the Grove following the service.
