Robin Darling Young

Academic Areas

  • Church History
  • Spirituality

    • School

  • School of Theology and Religious Studies

    • Expertise

  • History of Early Christianity
  • Patristic Theology
  • Eastern Christianity (Greek and Syriac and Armenian)
  • Monasticism

    • Biography

    Robin Darling Young (BA, Mary Washington College; MA, PhD, University of Chicago) is Ordinary Professor of Church History. She has published and lectured widely on topics in the history of early Christianity and its thought, including the areas of scriptural interpretation, the history of asceticism and monastic thought, and the Christian cultures of ancient Syria and Armenia.

    Professor Darling Young is currently preparing an annotated translation of the Letters of Evagrius of Pontus from the surviving Syriac translation for the Fathers of the Church series (CUA Press), and directing a translation team that will produce English translations from the Greek texts and Syriac translations of the same author’s Gnostic Trilogy (Praktikos, Gnostikos, Kephalaia Gnostika) for Oxford University Press.

    Books

    The Contra Celsum of Origen:  English Translation and Facing Greek text in the Graphai series. with J.W.Trigg Washington and Cambridge: Harvard University Press/Dumbarton Oaks, 2026.  

    Evagrius of Pontus:  The Gnostic Trilogy.  Chief Editor and Translator (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023) 

    Evagrius of Pontus.  Letters: Armenian Translation.  ed. with Hovsep Karapetyan.  Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (Louvain: Peeters, 2023)

    Evagrius and His Legacy, ed. with Joel Kalvesmaki (Notre Dame, IN:  University Press, 2016)

    To Train His Soul in Books: Essays on Syrian Asceticism In Honor of Sidney H. Griffith
    Edited with Monica Blanchard
    (Washington, D.C.:  CUA Press 2011)

    Reading Religions in the Ancient World: Essays Presented to Robert McQueen Grant on his 90th Birthday
    ed. with David Aune. Leiden:  Brill, 2007.  Supplement to Novum Testamentum.

    In Procession Before the World: Martyrdom as Public Liturgy in Early Christianity
    Pere Marquette Lecture, 2001.  (Milwaukee:  Marquette University Press, 2001)

    In Dominico Eloquio, In Lordly Eloquence:  Essays on Patristic Exegesis in Honor of Robert L. Wilken
    Edited with Paul M. Blowers, Angela Russell Christman, and David G. Hunter.  
    (Grand Rapids:  Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001)

    Eznik of Kolb. On God
    Translated and introduced, with Monica Blanchard
    (Leuven: Peeters Press, 1998)

    See more publications