CLAIRTON, PA, March 26, 2020 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present John Louis Mina, PhD, with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. An accomplished listee, Dr. Mina celebrates many years' experience in his professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes he has accrued in his field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Especially formative in his life was growing up in a family of highly cultured political exiles. Both his father, a Ruthenian from Transcarpathia, and his mother, a Czech from Moravia, fled Prague in February 1948 in the days of the fall of the Czechoslovak Third Republic. They met and were married in Paris, and John was born on January 31, 1950 in Nancy, France, where his father was doing graduate studies. His family moved on October 21, 1951 to the United States, settling eventually in California. He graduated first in his class, summa cum laude, from Pater Noster High School in Los Angeles and went on to earn a B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He was fortunate to spend a series of summers in Czechoslovakia with his maternal grandfather, a retired high government official and the son of a knight of the Austrian Empire. He was also able during two study tours in the Soviet Union to meet members of his father's family who had been severely repressed under Stalin.
He studied Pushkin and Tolstoy at Berkeley under Professor Hugh McLean, himself a student of Roman Jakobson, one of the pioneers of Russian studies at Harvard. Professor McLean was also the director of his doctoral dissertation on the medieval Russian folk spiritual epic songs, which Mr. Mina researched at the Universities of Leningrad and Moscow and the USSR Academy of Sciences. He studied Dostoevsky at Berkeley under the Nobel Prize winner Professor Czeslaw Milosz and Russian composition and stylistics under Olga Sorokina, the widow of Pitirim Sorokin, one of the founders of the modern science of sociology and secretary of Aleksandr Kerensky, head of the Russian Provisional Government in 1917.
He spent several years at the Pontifical Russian College, Oriental Institute and Gregorian University in Rome. It was at the Gregorian he studied with Professor Gustav Wetter, the Vatican's top specialist on Marxism. He was also deeply affected by his acquaintance with Czech Father Tomas Spidlik, a confessor of Pope John Paul II and later a cardinal of the Catholic Church. In 1989, he became a priest of the Byzantine Catholic Archdiocese of Pittsburgh, where he taught at the seminary. He is the archdiocesan representative on the theological committee of the Christian Associates, the major ecumenical organization of Churches in southwestern Pennsylvania. He is currently working on an article on the world view of the Russian folk spiritual epic songs and its influence on the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
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