John Skillen, Ph.D.

About:

Dr. John Skillen is recently retired after a long tenure at his undergraduate alma mater, Gordon College. After earning his Ph.D. in Literature at Duke University, he served for fifteen years as the medieval and Renaissance literature specialist in Gordon’s English department. Skillen then served for a decade as the founding director of the College’s arts-oriented semester program in Orvieto (Italy), and continues to direct the Orvieto-based Studio for Art, Faith & History. Through its program of seminars, conferences and projects in the visual arts and theater, the Studio adopts the practices, disciplines, media and genres of the rich pre-modern heritage of classical Christian culture to 21st century faith, schooling and community life. Not surprisingly, John has found himself increasingly in collaboration with the classical Christian schooling movement.

Skillen’s recent book, Making School Beautiful: Restoring the Harmony of Place (Classical Academic Press, 2020), argues that the classical liberal arts of language and thought, and of the mathematical arts, provide still-timely principles of architectural design, from classroom to campus. His earlier book, Putting Art (Back) in its Place (Hendrickson, 2016), explores the new timeliness of art designed for community-and-site-specific places.  His essays on the arts and tradition have appeared in IMAGE journal, the FORMA journal of the CiRCE Institute, the journal of Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA), and ARTS, the journal of the Arts, Religion and Culture Society (forthcoming). He is a contributor to the Visual Commentary on Scripture and the Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception (forthcoming).

John’s wife Susan is an ordained Anglican priest and spiritual director. Now empty nesters, the Skillens have raised four daughters in a small 1815 half-house in historic Newburyport, MA.