Lucian Turcescu

Who is Lucian Turcescu?

Lucian Turcescu, is a Romanian-born Canadian professor of theology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

He emigrated to Canada in 1992, and obtained his Ph.D. in theology from the University of Toronto in 1999. Turcescu taught for six years at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, where he became an Associate Professor and Chair of the Religious Studies Department. In 2005, he was recruited as an Associate Professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Concordia University.

Turcescu has done research, published, and taught in several areas, including religion and politics, early Christianity, and ecumenism. One of his main ideas is that there was no concept of person before the fourth century CE, when Christian theologians had to clarify what exactly they meant by one God in three persons. Another of his ideas which has attracted quite a bit of attention is that modern theologians, such as the influential Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon, have not understood the fourth-century concept of person properly and instead applied to it modern existentialist and personalist readings. He is also a proponent of the idea that functional democracies do not necessarily require the separation between church and state. Most of his research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He authored or co-authored over two dozens peer-reviewed articles which have been published in journals such as Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Europe-Asia Studies, East European Politics and Societies, Problems of Post-Communism, Religion, State and Society, Modern Theology, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, and Vigiliae Christianae.