Joshua Lollar

Ph.D., Theology, University of Notre Dame, 2011

Joshua Lollar is a scholar of Eastern Christianity with specific interests in Greek and Syriac patristics, Byzantine culture and theology, and modern Orthodox Christian thought. He approaches the field of patristics from the perspective of intellectual and literary history and is particularly interested in the way early and medieval Christian practices reveal a distinctive aesthetics of paideia and self-formation and of how these ideas were transmitted and transformed from community to community. He studies the encounters between the ancient philosophical and literary traditions of Greece and the early and medieval Christian communities that received them, appropriated them, fought with them, and shaped them. Dr. Lollar is also interested in the phenomenon of early and medieval Christian poetry, hymnography, and rhetoric–and particularly the figure of the poet or rhetorician–as expressive of diverse ways of religious life amongst Greeks, Syrians, and Latins in the early and Medieval Christian traditions. He approaches ancient Christian poetry as Biblical interpretation, as theological expression, and as an aspect of the literary and liturgical formation of Christian identity. Joshua's most recent publication, entitled To See into the Life of Things: The Contemplation of Nature in Maximus the Confessor and his Predecessors (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), is a study of the religious philosophy of Maximus the Confessor (580-662), who is one of the most important figures in the formation of Byzantine religious and philosophical culture.