V. Revd. Professor John Anthony McGuckin, is an Archpriest of the Orthodox Church in the Patriarchate of Romania's Western-European Archdiocese. He is currently Professor of Theology at Oxford University, and Nielsen Professor Emeritus at UTS and Columbia University New York. His academic career in theology and Church History began when he studied Philosophy at Heythrop College, London from 1970-72, and from there went on to read for a Divinity degree at the University of London, graduating with First Class Honours in 1975. For his doctoral researches at Durham University (1980), he studied the politics and theology of the early Constantinian era, with a thesis on the thought of Lucius Caecilius Lactantius, the Emperor Constantine's pacifist Christian tutor and political advisor. While he was a student at Durham he published his first book, an English edition of the Theological Chapters of St. Symeon the New Theologian, the medieval Byzantine poet and mystic. Since then he has published thirty books on religious and historical themes, becoming internationally recognized as a leading interpreter of the Early Christian and Eastern Orthodox traditions. He has taught in many Universities both in America and in Europe, as Visiting Distinguished Professor or as Visiting Scholar; including Kiev, Sibiu, Bucharest, Oslo, Iasi, Cambridge, Belfast, Oxford, Yale, Sydney and Moscow. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1986, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1996. He was elected as the prestigious Luce Fellow in Early Christianity in 2006. He was awarded the Order of St. Stephen the Great, the Cross of Moldavia and Bukovina, by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 2008; and was awarded the jewelled cross by Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church in America in 2012, on the occasion of his receipt of the Doctorate in Divinity Honoris Causa at St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary. He received the DLitt Honoris Causa from Lucian Blagea University, Sibiu in 2014.
Among his publications are: The Transfiguration of Christ in Scripture and Tradition (1986); St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy (1994); At the Lighting of the Lamps: Hymns from the Ancient Church (1995, and repr. 1997); St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (2000) (Nominated for the 2002 Pollock Biography Prize); Standing in God's Holy Fire: The Spiritual Tradition of Byzantium (Orbis, 2001); The Book of Mystical Chapters (Shambhala, 2002), The Westminster Handbook to Origen of Alexandria (WJK, 2004) and The Westminster Handbook To Patristic Theology (2004). His large-scale study of Eastern Christianity, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Theology, and Spiritual Culture appeared from Blackwell-Wiley in the summer of 2007. He has edited the largest-ever English language Encyclopedia of the Orthodox Church, appearing from Blackwell-Wiley in 2010, and going through several editions since. He has written a study of Christian law developing to the Byzantine polity, and most recently a definitive and large-scale account of the history of the Church in the first Millennium for IVP academic:'The Path of Christianity' (2016). In 2016 his collected research papers were issued by SVS Press, New York, in three volumes: the first dedicated to New Testament studies (Witnessing the Kingdom), the second focused on Patristic theology (Seeing the Glory) and the third concerned with Orthodox Spirituality (Seeing the Glory). He is the Director of the Sophia Institute,an international research center dedicated to Eastern Christian thought and culture. Under his direction it has issued 8 volumes of studies, gathering together Orthodox scholars from all over the world.
Professor McGuckin has appeared many times on American, British, and Italian Television programmes, as well as on Radio in Europe, America, and Canada; commenting on religious issues. In 2011 his film, co-authored with producer Norris Chumley was released on cable TV and DVD entitled: "Mysteries of the Jesus Prayer." He is currently preparing several short films on the life and teachings of the Eastern Christian Church. In 1994, his first collection of poetry, Byzantium and Other Poems, was published; and a second retrospective collection has recently appeared entitled: Selected Poems. Black Gate Press. (available www.blurb.com). While teaching Graduate classes at Union and Columbia Fr. John served as the Rector of the Eastern Orthodox Chaplaincy of St. Gregory the Theologian, in Manhattan. Today he is the Rector and Archpriest of St. Gregory's Orthodox Chapel, in the English coastal town of St. Annes on Sea. Contact: jam401@columbia.edu
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