(Director / Co-Founder)
Professor of Philosophy at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania. Founder of the Institute for the Study of Values and Spirituality together with John Farina. Director of the Iași Center of the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy (Washington DC). Editor of the Journal for Research in Values and Spirituality. Former Research Coordinator at the Romanian Academy-Iași Branch. Founding and organizing together with Dr. Constantinos Athanasopoulos (FHEA, UK/Greece) and Professor Oleg Dushin, (St Petersburg State University, Russia) the St Gregory Palamas Seminar: International Research into the Philosophical and Theological Work of St Gregory Palamas. His research interests are in the areas of Eastern European Spirituality and Philosophy, Intercultural Philosophy and Comparative Philosophy. He has also attended conferences, lectured, and/or has been published, in many foreign countries, including United States, Greece, Italy, Slovakia, Portugal, Turkey, Lebanon, Russia, China, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Kenia, South Africa, Argentina, Australia. His most recent publications include Philosophizing in the Christian East (2020); Founding Ideas of the Eastern-European Cultural Horizon (2014); Person, World, Ultimate Reality. Philosophy and Spirituality in the Christian East (2014); as well as “Paideia vs. Mystagogia: Formative Ideals and Today’s Digital World”, Education in an Age of Lies and Fake News. Regaining a Love of Truth (Springer, 2022) “Faces and Sur-faces: A Phenomenology of Intercultural Encounters”, The role of intercultural encounters: re-learning to be human for global times (CRVP, 2021); “The Patristic Notion of Person and its Importance for Modern Culture,” Religion and Culture in Dialog (Springer, 2016); “Gregory Palamas’ Critique of Nominalism,” Triune God. Incomprehensible but Knowable (Cambridge Scholars, 2015).