Vigen Guroian received his B.A. from the University of Virginia in 1970 and his Ph. D. in Theology from Drew University in 1978. He retired from his position as Professor of Religious Studies in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Virginia in 2015. For 2010-2011 he was the recipient of the University of Virginia Student Council Distinguished Teacher Award. He is also a recipient of the Circe Institute’s Russell Kirk Paideia Prize for a Life of Cultivating Virtue. Dr. Guroian lives in Culpeper, Virginia on five acres of rolling countryside where he tends his perennial beds and vegetable gardens, and enjoys strolling down the wooded “Wordsworthian Walk,” to Hungry Run.
Dr, Guroian has authored ten books and has contributed well over two hundred articles to books, journals, encyclopedias, magazines, and newspapers. His books have been translated into Greek, Portuguese, Russian, Romanian, and Korean.
Dr. Guroian’s most popular book is Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awake a Child’s Moral Imagination published by Oxford University Press in 1998. In its first edition, Tending the Heart received national attention in newspapers such as the Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun, and on radio, including NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” and “The Mark Steiner Show.” It is now in a second revised and expanded edition, 2023. This edition is also available as an audiobook. Tending the Heart has been read and used as an educational resource by parents, homeschoolers, religious instructors, and classical school faculties. Since retirement Guroian has given over most of his attention to speaking before and doing workshops with homeschooling parents and teachers of classical schools throughout the country.
In 2005, ISI Books issued a collection of Dr. Guroian’s essays on literature, politics, education, and ethics titled Rallying the Really Human Things. In addition, Dr. Guroian has written two books of Christian meditations on gardening. Inheriting Paradise (1999) and The Fragrance of God (2006). Mars Hill Audio offers a complete recording of Inheriting Paradise read by the author. The Fragrance of God has been the subject of an in-depth interview with the author on the syndicated National Public Radio Program, “On Being” (previously “Speaking of Faith”).
Over the years, Dr. Guroian has gained prominence as an Eastern Orthodox theologian and ethicist. His first book Incarnate Love: Essays in Orthodox Ethics (1987) has favored text in college and seminary courses, and the University of Notre Dame Press published a second expanded edition in 2002. In 2004, Wipf and Stock Publishers reissued his second book on ethics in the Orthodox tradition, Ethics After Christendom: Toward an Ecclesial Christian Ethic (1994). In 2010 Wm. B. Eerdmans issued The Melody of Faith: Theology in an Orthodox Key and in 2018 Baker Academic published The Orthodox Reality: Culture, Ecumenism, and Ethics.
Dr. Guroian is a Senior Fellow of the Center on Law and Religion of Emory University, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the John Jay Institute, Permanent Senior Fellow of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, and a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum.
He is on the faculty Memoria College Memoria Press.
More about Vigen Guroian’s professional career is available online in a Wikipedia entry.