Michael Plekon

Michael Plekon is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Religion, The City University of New York, Baruch College, where he taught for forty years. He was born in Yonkers, New York 3 April 1948. A student of Peter L. Berger, he received his PhD from Rutgers University under Berger's direction and his undergraduate AB from The Catholic University of America. He has been an NEH Fellow, honorary Lutheran World Federation, Fulbright and ACLS Fellow for postdoctoral study and research at the University of Copenhagen. He has been a Carmelite friar and a priest in both the Western and Eastern church, and has served five parishes in forty years of ministry. He has published his own work and as editor and translator close to twenty books, and numerous journal articles, chapters in books and reviews. He is married to Jeanne Bergreen Plekon since 1976, with two adult children. He has specialized on Kierkegaard, Thomas Merton, the Russian emigre theologians in Paris between the wars as well as contemporary persons of faith and their spiritual journeys--poets, novelists, activist, martyrs and teachers. He has written on prayer in everyday life and the world as sacrament. He edited essays on faith, ministry and the parish today-The Church Has Left the Building and continues work the parish in the 21st century. Community as church, church as community is his most recent book. He lives in the Hudson Valley and the Southern California desert.