Vigen Guroian (born 1948) is an Orthodox Christian theologian and professor who has written widely on ethics, politics, culture, literature, education, and gardening.
This medicinal and "physicalist" metaphor, which, he writes, is still prominent in Eastern Christian theology, piety, and worship, envisions salvation as the healing and restoration to wholeness of our wounded and diseased human nature by, through, and in Jesus Christ.
Guroian also contends that this vision of salvation as healing can contribute to a reappraisal of other central elements of Christian theology, such as love, human freedom, and divine grace.
[1] Other non-Orthodox readers have also highlighted his writings as helpful introductions to Orthodoxy, and have praised the way his articulation of Eastern Christianity may profitably illuminate certain standing problems in Western public discourse.
[3]Beyond his works in formal theology, Guroian has presented the lived experience of Orthodox spirituality in two lyrical and personal books on gardening, Inheriting Paradise (1999) and The Fragrance of God (2006).
[4] In it, Guroian illuminates the complex ways in which fairy tales and fantasies educate the ‘moral imagination’—roughly, the faculty by which human beings, even the young, reason from analogy about right and wrong.
He examines a wide range of stories–from "Pinocchio" and "The Little Mermaid" to "Charlotte's Web," "The Velveteen Rabbit," "The Wind in the Willows," and the "Chronicles of Narnia"–he argues that these tales capture the meaning of morality through vivid depictions of the struggle between good and evil, in which characters must make difficult choices between right and wrong, or heroes and villains contest the very fate of imaginary worlds.