Michael Plekon
Email: MJPlekon@aol.com, michael.plekon@baruch.cuny.edu
From September 1, 1977 till August 31, 2017 Michael Plekon was a faculty member at Baruch College of the City University of New York in the department of Sociology and Anthropology. He also was for many years coordinator of and professor in the program in Religion and Culture and he is Emeritus Professor.
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. Most recently, he has been writing about writers and activists and their search for God, identity and meaning as well as the death and resurrection of communities of faith in America. He has also examined the life and work of those in ordained ministry.
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 extensively on Kierkegaard and other modern theologians, he has also edited, translated and published several volumes of the writings of theologians Paul Evdokimov, Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Arthur Carl Piepkorn, Nicholas Afanasiev, Maria Skobtsova and other contemporary religious thinkers. He published a study of ten remarkable 20th century persons of faith in the Eastern Church, (Living Icons, UND Press, 2002) also one on the ordinary, diverse, often hidden shapes of holiness in our time.(Hidden Holiness, UND Press, 2009) To these he added a volume on saints as they really are (Saints as They Really Are, UND Press, 2012) and another on prayer in everyday life, listening to poets and other writers such as Mary Oliver, Christian Wiman, Mary Karr, Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Brown Taylor (Uncommon Prayer, UND Press, 2016) as well as one on an ecumenical array of writers giving us a worldly spirituality (The World as Sacrament, Liturgical Press 2017). Plekon edited numerous works, a groundbreaking study on the major journal of émigré Russian religious thinkers in Paris between the wars, also a pioneering analysis of the Moscow Council of 1917-18. The American monk and writer Thomas Merton has also been a focus of Plekon’s writing, with almost a dozen essays published on his writings.
He continues to edit, translate and produce studies. One published recently was a collection of reflections from an ecumenical collection of clergy and laity on faith, parish, and ministry in our time. (The Church has left the building, Cascade, 2016). Another, was published– Community as church, church as Community, Cascade, 2021)–on the decline and shrinkage of congregations but also their resurrection, through reimagining their mission, their place in the larger community and offering their space for community services during the week. A book on the ordained–Ministry Matters, Cascade, 2024) is about pastors, their lives and work today, through the eyes of over a dozen ecumenically diverse pastor-theologians, among them Will Willimon, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Rowan Williams, Sarah Coakley, Pope Francis, Henri Nouwen, to note a few. Presently he is working on a collection of essays, Communion and Community. He is also a reviewer for several journals.
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 is married to Jeanne Berggreen Plekon, a landscape artist. They have two adult children and several grandchildren. He has served for over forty years as a priest in the Eastern and Western churches, alongside work as a teacher and scholar, and in that time has assisted at a half dozen parishes.