An Interview with Dr. Dermot Curtin

by  Gordon Nary

Gordon: What is one of your earliest childhood memories?

Dermot: I think I have some hazy memories of my parent’s house in Southampton in the late 1980s. I think I remember wandering the backyard with my little sister Caitlin being terrified of the man who lived behind us who had a large mustache.

Gordon: When did you attend Villanova University, what degree did you earn, who was your favorite teacher, and why was that teacher your favorite?

Dermot: My undergraduate degree was in Theology, so I spent most of my time at the St. Augustine Center, which is where the college of Arts & Sciences was housed. My favorite teacher as an undergrad had to be the Augustinian Friar Fr. Tom Martin. When I first came into his office in Old Falvey he had a large poster from the Kebra Negast, an Ethiopian church work, which I recognized instantaneously. He would tell me about some of his journeys into Egypt, North Africa, and the Middle East. He was a fantastic mentor and helped me down the road to this patristic project.

Gordon: When did you attend Chestnut Hill College, what degree did you earn, and what is one of your favorite memories when you were there?

Dermot: I obtained a Masters from Chestnut Hill about ten years ago. Graduate education when you’re working full time is radically different from undergrad. I was really just in and out, and the campus is relatively small. It's a large castle on a hill on the edge of the  city of Philadelphia. On occasion I would see the remaining sisters there, the sisters of St. Joseph, I believe.

Gordon: When did you attend Chatham University, what degree did you earn, what was your favorite course, and why was that course your favorite?

Dermot: I got my doctorate from this small Pittsburgh school. It’s a PsyD, which is a doctorate specific to psychology. I truly enjoyed the more science heavy coursework, so the Neurophysiology of Behavior was something that really piqued my interest. The instructor was my chair, Tony Goreczny, who would later go on to mentor me in the field. I honestly cannot say enough good things about him. It's one thing to obtain an education with a basis in technical knowledge, but there is quite a bit in the task of being a professional and a family man on top of that.

Gordon: Tell us about your fellowships.

Dermot: I was a fellow twice with the Jewish Healthcare Foundation in Pittsburgh. They run a collective to encourage various medical and allied health professionals to engage with one another to address local problems and network. For the Jonas Salk fellowship I encountered a number of truly gifted innovators who sought to be able to address some of the complexities of healthcare. At the time I was really interested in telehealth as a response to healthcare shortages in rural areas. This was before COVID, so telemedicine was still considered novel and viewed with some suspicion. I was also a WELL fellow through the university there for a brief time.

Gordon: Tell us about your work in Independent Monitoring for Quality.

Dermot: This was a Commonwealth of Pennsylvania initiative to examine the quality of residential conditions for people with Intellectual Disabilities. My doctoral chair, Dr. Tony Goreczny ran it via his office in Sharpsburg and I was involved for a little while. I think this was formed years ago in the wake of the Pennhurst scandal and the move towards de-institutionalization.

Gordon: When and where did you serve as a Behavioral Health Clinician and what is one of your favorite memories when you were there?

Dermot: I’ve been in behavioral health for about fifteen years now. I’ve worked for quite a few agencies in that capacity. I think some of my favorite opportunities were as a student where I had rotations through the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. I had one through the Department of Neurological Surgery where we did mid-surgery testing down in the OR. That was probably one of the most salient experiences that I had during my career.

Gordon: When did you serve as a Doctoral Resident and what were some of the challenges of your work and how did you address them?

Dermot: I completed my doctoral internship through Conemaugh Memorial Medical Center in Johnstown, PA. Johnstown was a different pace from things I did previously. We were housed within the Family Medicine Clinic and paired with their Family Medicine/Internal Medicine residents. Our clinical didactics were split with the medical residents and our own department with some neuropsychology thrown in the mix as well. I am very interested in the integration of behavioral health into medicine, but I always feel at a loss with the massive knowledge that physicians have. Some of the residents were very kind and would happily expand upon some things if I asked.

Gordon: When and where did you serve as a Behavioral Health Consultant and provide an overview of your responsibilities.

Dermot: Directly following my time at Conemaugh Memorial Medical Center, I worked with a NIH Grant at Jefferson-Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia under the Chair of Psychiatry, who was our PI. We were attempting to screen people for substance use when they came into primary care, and work with the Internal Medicine cohorts to train them on adroit behavioral health interventions. I think Adam, Varun, and I are still looking at doing something with the dataset from that.

Gordon: You currently serve as a Post-Doctoral Psychological Assistant at Pike Creek Psychological Center. What are the primary neurocognitive issues that you address?      

Dermot: At Pike Creek most of my work deals with lower acuity issues. The founders are very interested in the integration of behavioral health and spirituality. I wanted to learn more about the art of this, particularly as this is what drew me to the field to begin with. I was very interested in the works of C.G. Jung years ago, but found it difficult to give him clinical application. My clinical work for the time being is finding where God fits into the consultation room.

Gordon: When did your interest in rare books begin?

Dermot: As an undergraduate I was always looking for texts that were inaccessible in various ways. They were either long out of print, or not recently translated, or had some other accessibility issue. Trying to sort my way through many of them was a challenge at the time, particularly without a guide. There are dealers who work with rare book collections who I have engaged with in the past, but it's a little bit of a different sub-specialty. The antiquarian book dealers want the physical copy of the rare book. Whereas I want to take the content of old books and put it into the vernacular language so that it can be read by anyone. Generally antique books collectors deal with extremely expensive collections. A few months ago I was touring a private collection in New Castle with a friend of mine and was shown a page from the Gutenberg Bible. My guess is that page of text is worth around $300,000. Being around those antique texts, as you can imagine, makes me very nervous, so I prefer the facsimile of antique texts rather than dealing with originals.

Gordon: In what languages are you proficient for translations?

Dermot: I tend to stick largely with Latin and Greek, although I have a background with French and German, and proudly speak broken Irish. I’m involved with all of the books that we produce, but if it’s beyond those languages my role is largely just editorial. TSP tends to employ contractors for a variety of languages that are a little more rare.

Gordon: Tell us about The Scriptorium Project.

Dermot: The Scriptorium project is a library of patristic texts. That is to say works from the early and medieval church. Sometimes this involves the lives of saints, local or national synods, papal letters, works of philosophy, civil and ecclesiastical laws, et cetera. There are many elements that go into the great ‘tradition’ of the church which have been historically inaccessible to most people. The Scriptorium Project is looking to make it available, at least in English, to anyone around the world. It did have a bit of an accidental founding. I don’t think there was ever a clear plan to establish something this culturally significant. When I was still an undergraduate at Villanova I spent a significant amount of time at the library and started to collect Latin texts that were of interest to me- nothing that would be significant to most lay people, but maybe interesting to other theology students. Most of it was drawn from the French Jesuit Jacques Migne’s collection of texts. Eventually the collection got larger and larger, and I moved it to more official means of distributing the texts through utilizing a publication house, and the various distributors that it currency house. For myself, who has no background in business or the publishing industry, this feels like nothing short of a logistical miracle.

Gordon: Approximately how many books are translated in The Scriptorium Project?

Dermot: Right now I’d say around seven hundred, but likely more than that. The catalogue has hit a dizzying height as of recently. We also have a list of titles waiting to be released. My guess is that we’ve barely scratched the surface of church documents; maybe 0.01% of what is truly out there, so there still is quite a bit of work out there to be done.

Gordon: What are your top five books that you have translated?

Dermot:  They are

(1) The Happy Life by St. Augustine of Hippo- Also called De Beata Vita. In it St. Augustine gives practice advice on what happiness is and how the encounter with God is necessary to establish this,

(2) The Vision of Theophilus by St. Cyril of Alexandria- an old Coptic legend expanding upon the account of the Flight into Egypt in St. Matthew’s Gospel. I wrote the introduction and commentary, but the translation is an older work, as I don’t know Arabic,

(3) Ancient Letters of the Irish Church: Volumes I & II- A collection of the earliest writings of the Catholic Church in Ireland from the time of St. Patrick until the medieval period,

(4) The Ramban Pattu(- a legendary recounting of the mission of St. Thomas the Apostle to India and his establishment of the church in Southern India. Again, I write the introduction and commentary, as it was originally composed as a song in Malayalam,

(5) On Fate by St. Albert the Great- the German Catholic St. Albert discusses the alleged existence of fate through various arguments in scripture and natural observation.

Gordon: Thank you for a fascinating interview.