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Bernard McGinn, the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley
Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago
Divinity School, is widely regarded as the preeminent
scholar of mysticism in the Western Christian
tradition. He has also written extensively on
Jewish mysticism, the history of apocalyptic thought,
and medieval Christianity. A cum laude graduate
of St. Joseph's Seminary and College in Yonkers,
NY, he earned a doctorate in theology from the
Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1963
and a Ph.D. in history from Brandeis University
in 1970. After teaching theology for a year at
The Catholic University of America, he joined
the Chicago faculty in 1969 as an instructor in
theology and the history of Christianity and was
appointed a full professor nine years later. Dr.
McGinn was named to the Donnelley chair in 1992.
He retired in 2003. The recent recipient of a
Mellon Foundation Emeritus Grant, he also has
held a Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship, an
American Association of Theological Schools research
award, two research fellowships for work at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Hebrew University
in Jerusalem, a research fellowship at the Institute
for Ecumenical and Culture Research at St. John's
University, and a Lily Foundation Senior Research
Fellowship. Dr. McGinn has delivered invited lectures
at some one hundred colleges and universities
in North America, Europe, and Israel. He is a
fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and of the Medieval Academy of America. Past-president
of the International Society for the Promotion
of Eriugenean Studies, the American Society of
Church History, and the American Catholic Historical
Association, he is member of the board of The
Eckhart Society. He served as editor-in-chief
of the Paulist Press series Classics of Western
Spirituality and currently serves as a member
of the editorial boards of Cistercian Publications,
The Encyclopedia of World Spirituality, The Collected
Works of Bernard Lonergan, and Spiritus. The author
of some 150 articles in scholarly journals, he
has been the editor or co-editor of ten books,
including two volumes of the works of the German
Dominican theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart
and (with John J. Collins and Stephen J. Stein) The Continuum History of Apocalypticism (2003).
The most recent of his fifteen books are the third
volume of a projected five-volume series on Christian
mysticism in the West, The Flowering of Mysticism:
Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200-1350
(1998), The Doctors of the Church: Thirty-Three
Men and Women who Shaped Christianity (1999),
his highly-acclaimed Meister Eckhart's Mystical
Thought: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing (2001),
and (with his wife Patricia Ferris McGinn) Early
Christian Mystics: The Divine Vision of the Spiritual
Masters, an introductory guide to selected mystics,
which was published by Crossroad in 2003. The
fourth volume in series on Christian mysticism, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300-1500),
will be published by Crossroad-Herder later this
year.
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