Paul J. Griffiths is Warren Chair of Catholic Theology at Duke University Divinity School. His current academic focus is philosophical theology and philosophy of religion, but his wide-ranging intellectual interests also include Indian Buddhist thought and inter-religious dialogue. A graduate of Oxford University where he studied at Trinity College and took first-class honors in theology, Dr. Griffiths received an M.Phil. in classical Indian religion and Sanskrit from Oxford in 1980 and a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies from the University of Wisconsin in 1983. After teaching South Asian studies for a year at Wisconsin, he was appointed assistant professor of South Asian languages and civilization at the University of Chicago in 1984, joined the University of Notre Dame faculty as an assistant professor of theology in 1986, and returned to Chicago in 1990 as associate professor of the philosophy of religions in The Divinity School and in the university’s South Asian languages and civilizations department. He was named a full professor in 1997 and, three years later, moved on to the University of Illinois at Chicago as Arthur J. Schmitt Professor of Catholic Studies. He accepted his present position in 2008. Dr. Griffiths has been the Alan F. Richardson Fellow at the University of Durham and the recipient of an American Academy of Religion research grant and a Luce Fellowship. An elected member of the American Society for the Study of Religion, the American Theological Society, and the Academy of Catholic Theology (ACT), he currently serves on the governing board of ACT. He is a member of the board of advisors of the English edition of Nova et Vetera and on the editorial boards of Pro Ecclesia and of the Peeters Press series Christian Commentaries on Non-Christian Classics. The author or co-author of some fifty papers published in academic journals or as chapters in volumes of collected works, he is the editor or co-editor of six books, including the Christianity through Non-Christian Eyes (1990), which has been reprinted nine times, and, (with Reinhard Hütter) Reason and the Reasons of Faith (2005). Dr. Griffiths is also the co-author of one book and the author of eight others, including two early works that established him as an incisive interpreter of Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy, On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem (1986) and On Being Buddha: The Classical Doctrine of Buddhahood (1994). His Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (1999), an account of sacred texts in religious life, has been hailed as a landmark in religious studies. His philosophical contributions to the relations among religions include An Apology for Apologetics: A Study in the Logic of Interreligious Dialogue (1991) and Problems in Religious Diversity (2001). Three recent works in philosophical theology are Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity (2004), The Vice of Curiosity: An Essay on Intellectual Appetite (2006), and Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar, which was published by the Catholic University Press of America in 2009. He is completing a commentary on the Song of Songs for the Brazos Theological Commentary on Scripture and has begun a book on the delights of Christian skepticism.
