Jason Scully, Ph.D.
Teaching Fellow
Core Curriculum
My research and published work investigates the history of Christian theology during the Patristic and Early-Medieval time periods with a particular focus on Greek and Syriac spirituality and ascetical literature. My first book, Isaac of Nineveh's Ascetical Eschatology (Oxford University Press), examines the spirituality of Isaac of Nineveh, a Syriac speaking monk who was born in Qatar in the seventh-century and lived in Southeast Iraq, and provides the first comprehensive investigation of Isaac's Syriac cultural heritage. My research on Isaac provides the Christian tradition with a different lens through which to view its own history so that it can become truly catholic (i.e. universal) and capable of engaging the faith of non-Western Christians.
In my CORE classes at Seton Hall University, I offer a forum for critical thinking and discussion of historical texts with the goal of reflecting on how history interacts with modern culture and with the lives of each of my students.
Education
- Ph.D., Marquette University
- M.A., University of Virginia
- B.A., Wheaton College
Scholarship
- “Redemption for the Serpent: The Reception History of Serpent Material from the Physiologus in the Greek, Latin, and Syriac Traditions,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 22:3 (2018): 422-455.
- "Free Will and Ascetical Labor: How Babai the Great Fixes the Platonic Conception
of the Soul,"
Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 70:3-4 (2018): 193-222. - "Bonaventure's Use of Jerusalem as Metaphor for Protological and Eschatological Human
Nature,"
Downside Review 136:2 (2018): 118-132. - Isaac of Nineveh’s Ascetical Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.)
- “The Itinerant Mind in Dadisho Qatraya’s Commentary on Abba Isaiah: Perfection in the East-Syriac Tradition,” Studia Monastica 58:2 (2016): 2019-41.
- “Babai the Great’s Exegesis of Paul as Corrective to Evagrian Eschatology.” In Biblical & Qur’anic Traditions in the Middle East, 163-82. Edited by Cornelia B. Horn and Sydney H. Griffith. Warwick: Abelian Academic, 2016.
- “Lowering in order to be Raised, Emptying in order to be Filled: The Ascetical System of the Book of Steps.” Pages 297-312 in Breaking the Mind: New Studies in the Syriac Book of Steps. Edited by Kristian S. Heal and Robert A. Kitchen. CUA Studies in Early Christianity. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013.
- “The Exaltation of Seth and Nazirite Asceticism in the Cave of Treasures.” Vigiliae Christianae 68:3 (2014): 310-28.
- “Angelic Pneumatology in the Egyptian Desert: The Role of the Angels and the Holy Spirit in Evagrian Asceticism.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 19:2 (2011): 287-305.
- “The Transmission of Evagrian Theological Concepts into East Syrian Christianity: A Comparison of Evagrius and Sahdona on Contemplation and Anthropology,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 54:1-4 (2009): 77-96.
Accomplishments
- North American Patristics Society Small Research Grant, 2014