Emmanuel Durand

Biography

My first intellectual passion was physics, in which I briefly pursued university studies. I wanted to contemplate the stars. My second passion was philosophy. The master’s program I undertook in Paris (La Sorbonne-Paris IV, 1996) heightened my interest in ethics and literature. I explored how, in Athens, Solon’s laws and Sophocles’s tragedies anticipated the decoding of human choice, articulated a little later through Socratic ethics. My third and ultimate passion is theology. At first, I was fascinated by the various ways of perceiving the triune God. That was the topic of my doctoral thesis (Paris/Leuven, 2004), centred on a specific term (the Greek perichoresis) used to describe the persons’ reciprocal inherence. I investigated this area further in a second thesis (postdoctoral qualification in Europe) dealing with the controversial person of God as father (Fribourg CH, 2007). My subsequent work examined the singularity and universality of Christ, the divine providence, and creation as a calling, to name a few. I first taught at the Institut catholique de Paris, between 2001 and 2014, then came to Dominican University College (DUC) in early 2015. I accepted the offer to join this human-scale institution to work with others, diversify my courses and engage in innovative thought. Teaching, in my view, is a laboratory of the spoken and written word. After no fewer than two decades, I am starting to grasp what I have been searching for: first, how to deal in direct style with questions posed to God on the basis of biblical testimonies of faith, for theology loses its significance when removed from that foundation; secondly, how to connect the most human and the most divine, flesh and God, in a quest to understand our contemporaries and to speak with them in their own language.

Research Interest

Solon’s laws and Sophocles’s tragedies anticipated the decoding of human choice, articulated a little later through Socratic ethics.