Dr. Samuel Kaldas

Dr. Samuel Kaldas is Director of Research & Community Engagement at St Cyril’s. He studied philosophy, ancient history, and Orthodox theology before completing a PhD on the early modern philosophers of religion known as the “Cambridge Platonists”. In 2022, he was a Distinguished Research Fellow of Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center, writing on the development of Coptic eucharistic theology in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Research & supervision interests

Philosophy of Religion; Patristics; Desert Fathers; Religious Epistemology; Coptic Orthodox Theology; Science and Religion.

Recent publications

The Cambridge Platonists and Early Modern Philosophy: Inventing the Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge Studies in Religion and Philosophy, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2023.

(Co-authored with Stephen Meawad). “Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Church and State.” Palgrave-Macmillan Handbook of Religion and State. Forthcoming, 2023.

“From Garments of Flesh to Garments of Light: Hardness, Subtleness and the Soul-Body Relation in Macarius-Symeon.” In The Unity of Body and Soul in Patristic and Byzantine Thought, edited by Anna Usacheva, S. Bhayro and J. Ulrich. Contexts of Ancients and Medieval Anthropology, vol. 1. Leipzig: Brill, 2020.

“‘Draughts of Love and Divine Revelations’: Experiential Theology in Matta Al-Miskīn and Fayek M. Ishak.” In Copts in Modernity, edited by Nelly van Doorn-Harder, Lisa Agaiby and Mark Swanson. Leiden: Brill 2020.

“A ‘Strange New Philosophy’ of Forgiveness: Insights from St John Chrysostom on Forgiving the Unrepentant.” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 3 (2019): 261–271.