Dr. Paul Blowers

Dr. Paul Blowers is the Dean E. Walker Professor of Church History. He is a scholar of patristics and early Christianity and has written also on the Stone-Campbell heritage. He is a former President of the North American Patristics Society and Associate Editor of the Journal of Early Christian Studies, and in 2017-18 was a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology.

His authored and edited works include Visions and Faces of the Tragic: The Mimesis of Tragedy and the Folly of Salvation in Early Christian Literature (2020), Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World (2016), Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety (2012), Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor (1991). He is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation (2019) and has two works of translation of early Christian texts, Moral Formation and the Virtuous Life (2019), and On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings of St. Maximus the Confessor (2003). He also has articles in the Journal of Early Christian Studies, Vigiliae Christianae, Studia Patristica, Pro Ecclesia, Church History, Modern Theology, and Studies in Christian Ethics. He has also produced long essays for The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, the Cambridge History of Christianity, the Oxford Handbook to Maximus the Confessor, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation. He edited and translated The Bible in Greek Christian Antiquity (1997) and was a general editor of The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement (2004).

Paul and his wife Sandy, a nurse and teacher, have four children and sixteen grandchildren.

His lecture is entitled “A Christoform and Cruciform Cosmology: The Shaping of the Doctrine of Creation in the Early Church.”