The Maxwell Institute is excited to announce that Research Fellow Kristian Heal has been named a Senior Research Fellow as of October 17, 2023. Dr. Heal has worked at the Maxwell Institute since 2000 and is the author of Genesis 37 and 39 in the Early Syriac Tradition (2023) and Jacob of Sarug's Homily on Aaron the Priest (2022). Heal is a scholar of late antique Syriac Christianity, and looks at the point where scripture, poetry, reception, and transmission intersect.
J.B. Haws, director of the Maxwell Institute, thanked Dr. Heal for his work. "Kristian’s promotion is a well-deserved recognition of the contributions he makes to the work of the Maxwell Institute on a number of fronts."
"His great mind is matched by his great heart—he is as good a colleague as he is a scholar. He is consistently thinking in terms of edifying and strengthening others, both in the work that he does individually and the work that we aim to do collectively," said Haws.
Before his current appointment, Heal served in various roles as Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship (2018-2023), Associate Director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship (2017-2018), Director of BYU’s Center for the Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts (2004-2016), and editor of BYU’s Eastern Christian Texts Series (2002-2018).
Dr. Philip Barlow, Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute recognized Heal's contributions. "Kristian Heal has been a natural, and sometimes an official, leader at the Maxwell Institute since the time of my arrival in 2017. Our sight of the Restoration’s relationship to earliest Christianity and the Bible would be poorer without his research and thought, laced with wit and insight," Barlow said.
"Our sense of ourselves as scholars in the Lord’s cause would be poorer without his having taken time from his individual work for stints as the Institute’s Associate and Acting Director. His promotion to Senior Research Fellow gives proper title to the de facto station he holds among us."
In the past few years, Heal edited Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints with Jason R. Combs, Mark D. Ellison, and Catherine Gines Taylor, and served as co-host of the Maxwell Institute Podcast, Abide, for the Old Testament season, broadening Latter-day Saints’ understanding of early Christianity.
Heal’s colleague, Dr. Morgan Davis said, “Kristian is a scholar’s scholar. In his bones, he loves the idea of the university where people come together with a diversity of gifts and training in a common quest to seek truth and build a better world.”