Dr. Vigen Guroian

Vigen Guroian has been a professor of religious studies (Eastern Christianity) at the University of Virginia. He also held a position as a senior fellow of both the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in Mecosta, Michigan and the Center on Law and Religion at Emory University.

He has been an academic consultant for several of the Trinity Forum seminar curricula.

Before joining the faculty at Virginia, he was a professor of theology and ethics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. Since 1986, Dr. Guroian has been a member of the faculty of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary and University. For the academic year 1995-96 he was named the Distinguished Lecturer in Moral and Religious Education at the Institute.

Guroian is the author of several books, as well as editor of an edition of Russell Kirk’s ghost stories, Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales. He has also published nearly two hundred articles in books and journals on a range of subjects including marriage and family, children’s literature, ecology, liturgy and ethics, genocide, and medical ethics.

For more than a dozen years, he has taught courses and workshops on religion and morality in children’s literature at the Ecumenical Institute of Theology, at Loyola College, and at the University of Virginia. Guroian’s book, Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination, has been the subject of numerous radio and newspaper interviews including NPR’s Talk of the Nation.

Among his books are two volumes of Christian meditations on gardening: Inheriting Paradise and The Fragrance of God. They have earned him invitations to speak and give readings from gardening groups and churches in America and Great Britain. Mars Hill Audio offers a complete recording of Inheriting Paradise read by the author. The Fragrance of God has been the subject of an interview with the author on the syndicated National Public Radio program, Speaking of Faith.

Guroian attended the University of Virginia and received his Ph.D. in theology from Drew University in 1978. He was an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia from 1978 to 1981, and he held a post there as well in the Center for Russian and East European Studies. He has also been a visiting lecturer at St. Nersess Armenian Seminary in New Rochelle, New York, where he was the Seminary’s Director of Academic Affairs from 1990 to 1992.

Guroian is a Senior Fellow of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, a Senior Fellow of the Center on Law and Religion at Emory University, a Richard M. Weaver Fellow, and a Salvatori Fellow of the Heritage Foundation. He is currently on the Board of Governors of the Washington Latin School in Alexandria, Virginia, on the advisory board and accreditation committee of the Orthodox Schools Association, and a permanent consultant to the Armenian Religious Education Council of the Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America.

He has served on numerous editorial boards, including The Journal of Religious Ethics, Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology, and Christian Bio-Ethics. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Society of Christian Ethics and on the Executive Committee of Christians Associated for Relations with Eastern Europe and has been active in both the National Council of Churches and in the World Council of Churches. Recently, he has served on several interdisciplinary consultations on subjects including law, ecumenical relations, human nature, and children, including the Project on Christian Jurisprudence: Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Teachings on Law, Politics, and Society at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion of Emory University.

He and his wife June live in central Virginia. They have two adult children: a son, Rafi, and a daughter, Victoria.

Selected Publications and Scholarly Work

• The Fragrance of God (2006)

• Rallying the Really Human Things: Moral Imagination In Politics, Literature, and Everyday Life (2005)

• Ethics After Christendom: Toward an Ecclesial Christian Ethic (2004)

• Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination (2002)

• Incarnate Love: Essays in Orthodox Ethics (2002)

• Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening (2001)

• Life’s Living Toward Dying: A Theological and Medical-Ethical Study (1996)

• Incarnate Love: Essays in Orthodox Ethics (2002)

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