Born in 1953, Steven Hawkes-Teeples grew up in San Antonio, Texas. He was baptized into the Catholic Church during his first year at San Antonio College. He completed a BA and an MA in French literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1982 and was ordained a priest in the Byzantine-Ruthenian Church in 1993. Studying under Archimandrite Robert Taft, he completed a doctorate in Eastern Christian liturgy in 1998 with a dissertation on the liturgy in the commentaries of St. Symeon of Thessalonika. From 1997 to 2001, he was director of the Diaconal Formation Program of the Byzantine-Ruthenian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has also taught at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York and at Regis College in Toronto. Since 2001 he has been teaching liturgy at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome.