Professor Emeritus, Baruch College of the City University of New York
Curriculum Vita
Website: http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/wsas/academics/anthropology/mplekon.htm
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Michael Plekon is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Religion and Culture, The City University of New York, Baruch College, where he taught for forty years. He received his A.B. from The Catholic University of America and his M.A. and Ph.D from Rutgers University where he was a student of Peter L. Berger. He was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, honorary Fulbright, American Scandinavian Institute and Lutheran World Federation Fellow at the University of Copenhagen’s Institute for Systematic Theology in 1979-80 and 1981, working on Kierkegaard's social and theological criticism. Having published many articles on Kierkegaard and other modern theologians, he has also edited, translated and published the writings of numerous Paris Russian emigre theologians, Sergius Bulgakov, Paul Evdokimov, Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Mother Maria Skobtsova and Nicholas Afanasiev, among others, helped edit and translate studies on the Paris emigre journal The Way, and on the Moscow Council of 1917-18.

All told, Michael Plekon's areas of specialization include the social history of American religious traditions and communities, social theory and its connections with theology, the social and theological thought of Søren Kierkegaard, contemporary Eastern Orthodox theology and theologians of the Russian emigration and saints, canonized or not, in our time. His publications on these themes include Living Icons (2004), Hidden Holiness (2009), Saints as They Really Are (2012), Uncommon Prayer (2016) and The World as Sacrament (2017). Most recently he has been working on the decline and revival of congregations in the US, with The Church Has Left the Building (2016) and Community as Church, Church as Community (2022). He continues writing on these areas as well as regular reviews for journals. He has been in ordained ministry for 40 years and has been a priest of the Western and Eastern Churches, serving a half dozen parishes non-stipendiary and still active.