Associate Professor Doru Costache

Associate Professor in Theology (Patristic Studies), St Cyril's Coptic Orthodox Theological College
BTh, University of Bucharest ThD (Patristics), University of Bucharest

Protopresbyter Associate Professor Doru Costache was trained at the Radu Vodă Seminary, Bucharest, Romania (1983-1988). He has undertaken undergraduate studies (1989-1993) and doctoral studies (1995-1999) in Orthodox theology at the University of Bucharest. His doctoral thesis, publicly defended in March 2000, was on the anthropic cosmological principle interpreted from the viewpoint of a patristic theologian, Saint Maximus the Confessor, and a neopatristic theologian, Father Dumitru Stăniloae. He has over twenty years of tertiary teaching experience (the University of Bucharest, 1995-2004; the Sydney College of Divinity, 2005-to date), and was the Durham International Senior Research Fellow of Institute of Advanced Study, the University of Durham, Epiphany Term, 2018. He is an Honorary Associate of the Department of Studies in Religion, the School of Letters, Art and Media, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney.

Humankind and the Cosmos: Early Christian Representations (2021) is Doru’s latest book published by Brill. He is the co-author of Introducere în Dogmatica Ortodoxă (1997), Știință și Theologie: Preliminarii pentru Dialog (2001), Sfinții Părinți despre Originile și Destinul Cosmosului și Omului (2003), and Dreams, Virtue and Divine Knowledge in Early Christian Egypt(2019). He is the co-editor of Well-Being, Personal Wholeness and the Social Fabric (2017).

Doru was ordained to the diaconate in January 1997 and to the priesthood in May 2001, and is married with one daughter. He is the Protopresbyter of the Romanian Orthodox Diocese of Australia and New Zealand and a minister at St Gregory the Theologian’s Mission in Mona Vale NSW.

Currently working on

Currently, Costache participates in project Science and Orthodoxy around the World/SOW (2020-2023) hosted by the Institute of Historical Research at the National Hellenic Research Foundation (Athens), recipient of a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation (http://project-sow.org/people). In that capacity, together with Dr Alexei Nesteruk (University of Portsmouth, UK) he cochairs the Cosmology group, reuniting researchers from three continents. Alongside two chapters he writes with two Sydney-based scientists, he will coedit the volume which will reunite the contributions of the group, to be published in 2023. In parallel, he prepares for publication a monograph based on his unpublished doctoral thesis (Bucharest 2000), on Saint Maximus the Confessor’s worldview. As the ISCAST Research Director (May 2021), he implements an ambitious programme of relaunching the research activity of the organisation (http://iscast.org/team).

Awards/Honours

Since 2020 Fellow of ISSR International Society for Science & Religion
Since 2020 Fellow of ISCAST Christians in Science and Technology
2021-2022 Selby Old Fellow in Religious History of the Orthodox Christian Faith at the University of Sydney

Only a limited number of publications are listed here. For more visit Academia.edu.

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