The 2-in-1

Priestly professor Ted Pulcini balances a dual career and identity.

by Sherri Kimmel

December 30, 2008

Father Ted Pulcini

One room couldn’t be blander—vanilla ice cream lodged in the cooler amidst Baskin-Robbins’ more richly hued 30. White walls, whiteboard, long, laminated- wood table.

The other room is rainbow sherbet—layers of colors gilding saintly icons, air thick with incense and candle smoke.

Their common factor? A leader who provokes passion and a communitarian impulse in those he addresses—in one case spawning a desire for shared knowledge, in the other for spiritual rapture.

Visit both venues, and you will see just how completely one can be two.

It’s 9 a.m., normally a deadly hour for undergraduates. But these dozen students, six of each sex, are bright-eyed, well-prepared and chatty. Only one rolls in late. Seated at the head of the long seminar table in East College is Ted Pulcini, associate professor of religion. He has the students laughing as he relays a tale from his graduate-school days—of a misstep he made while jogging and listening to a Walkman.

Then it’s down to cases—a rapid-fire, 90-minute discussion of soteriology—the theory of salvation. The class is Eastern Orthodoxy, a subject Pulcini knows well, since he is a full-time priest for a congregation in Chambersburg, Pa.

There is no preachiness in his discourse, though. It’s strictly academic. “The central concept of all theology is the idea of salvation,” he tells the class. “What does salvation mean?”

“Being saved,” offers one young woman.

“From what?” remarks the professor.

“Eternal damnation.”

“So in this view, when is one not saved?” Pulcini queries.

“Generally, when you haven’t accepted Christ,” replies a young man.

“Well, this is one view of salvation, the legal view, which sees Christ as having paid some debt by dying on the cross,” Pulcini explains. “In Orthodox theology, this is what’s known as the objective aspect of salvation, but it’s not the full understanding. …” Pulcini pops to his feet and writes “objective” on the whiteboard and proceeds to discuss other concepts of soteriology. For the rest of the class he hops up to write, then sits back down. Up, down, up, down. At one point he says, chuckling, “I can’t sit down, it’s true.”

Three days later, it’s still true; he can’t sit down. But now he has traded his blue-and-white-striped dress shirt and blue tie for a floor-length, turquoise and gold brocade vestment and tall black hat. He’s moving back and forth at the front of the ornate sanctuary, with four chanters on his left and about 100 people standing before him, singing the liturgy. The diversity of the congregation is startling—the bent-over, black-mantilla-draped octogenarian that one might expect but also black and Latino children. Like the students in the seminar room they are fully engaged by their energetic leader.

For a man with two full-time careers, any wear and tear certainly remains hidden.

“I don’t cut corners in either of these jobs—the academic energizes the ecclesiastical, and vice versa,” says Pulcini. Admittedly, he does have to be a good time manager, as he spends five days a week on campus and three nights a week at St. Mary’s Orthodox Church.

That he pivots between the two locales smoothly is confirmed by Kathy Martin, a parishioner from Arendtsville, Pa., who also has observed his classes.

“There’s a big similarity,” she says. “He truly engages the congregation when he sermonizes and the students when he instructs. You can hear a pin drop in both venues. His expertise and knowledge in being a spiritual leader come out in the classroom, but the way he presents the material doesn’t have a bias toward Orthodoxy.

“He’s very charismatic in his approach in both settings,” she adds. “People are very rapt in what he’s saying. That’s the draw—it’s not a struggle to sit through it.”

The sermons are miniature compared to the lectures. In a service that lasts more than an hour, a recent sermon consumed a mere 12 minutes. On that Sunday in October, Pulcini reflected on harvest time during his childhood growing up in Aliquippa, a small steel-mill town outside Pittsburgh. Switching from the formal, ritual mode of the liturgy to a warm, smiley, humorous, almost folksy style during the sermon, he swiftly shifted back to his high-priest mode after he concluded his sermon with the thought that one should not just maintain a garden but cultivate it in a way that makes one proud at harvest time.

Orthodoxy’s rich ritualism, which also leaves room for a creative approach, drew Pulcini from his Roman Catholic origins. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Pulcini studied Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations with a concentration in the Old Testament. His studies led him to Middle Eastern Christianity and on to Eastern Orthodoxy.

“Eastern Orthodoxy just resonated with me,” he recalls. “I won a fellowship after I graduated and was able to travel for a year. I studied Eastern Christian communities throughout Western Europe and ended up in Jerusalem, which is a microcosm of Eastern Christianity. And that’s when it became clear to me that Eastern Christianity is where I belonged.

“It’s much less regimented and constrained than in the West,” he explains. “In the East, it’s extremely traditional and very conservative—one would even say preservative—of traditional forms and doctrinal formulations. But there’s a tremendous latitude within the guardrails that the tradition provides for creativity and open inquiry. The liturgy and the mysticism of the Eastern Church were what really grabbed my heart; the theology grabbed my mind.”

If you ask him which came first, the professor or the pastor, he’ll respond, “the two were inextricably bound—always.” In 1984, Pulcini was ordained as an Orthodox priest and began serving parishes. Ten years later he finished his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh; he came to Dickinson in 1995.

Provost and Dean Neil Weissman says there has been no other faculty member who also was a full-time religious leader since his own arrival at the college in 1975. Pulcini, who has won the college’s top teaching honors, the Ganoe and Distinguished Teaching awards, hasn’t let the demands of clergy work affect his classroom performance, according to Weissman.

“There is no one quite like Ted,” he adds. “He does his job fully and completely and is very involved in the community, having served as chair of the planning and budget committee, for instance. And he brings an important experiential dimension to his teaching. His commitment to the church informs but in no way biases his teaching. It’s refreshing in an academic community.”

To those who question his capacity to perform two demanding full-time jobs, Pulcini responds, ”Well, if you’re married and have a family, how do you teach and go to all the school conferences and all your kids’ soccer games and all of that stuff? Your family takes a lot of your time, and you have to balance that with your career. Well, for me, my church community is my family.”

Though full-time preaching and teaching is uncommon, it is not unheard of, especially in the world of Orthodoxy, where congregations in places like central Pennsylvania tend to be small. An English professor at Franklin & Marshall College also leads an Orthodox congregation, as does a librarian from Mount St. Mary’s University.

As the congregation, which Pulcini began in a parishioner’s basement more than a decade ago, grows, he has asked his members to put aside money for the day they will need to employ a salaried pastor. Pulcini does the job free of charge.

“It’s worked out very well, because my congregation knows I’m teaching full time, and they don’t burden me with little incidental things that they can do themselves,” he notes. “If you’re receiving pay, they expect you to do everything from pastoral counseling to taking out the garbage. [When he agreed to form the congregation] I said, ‘I will not take any pay from you, and I won’t take any crap from you, either.’ ”

On the other side of his work equation Pulcini pursues the speaking and writing that have always energized him. During last year’s sabbatical, he wrote a 35-page booklet, Face to Face: A Guide for Orthodox Christians Encountering Muslims, that he says “is selling like hotcakes—and not just to the Eastern Orthodox.” To extend its range, he has recorded several podcast commentaries.

Mediating between faiths has always been an aim for Pulcini. “It’s my duty, not only as a pastor but as an academic religionist, to make sure that religion is a force for good. And that happens only when people understand, first, who they are and, secondly, who the others are. Once you do, it’s very hard to caricature and demonize.”

Pulcini’s current writing project is a memoir, Orange Skies, set in his hometown in the late 1960s, during a time of interracial tensions. “In this town, different ethnic groups were used to living together in respectful creative tension. But it all exploded.”

Traversing different identities and worlds, whether as the son of a steelworker heading to Harvard or as a liberal-arts professor driving down Interstate 81 to his parish, an Egyptian/Coptic beauty blossoming between the Wal-Mart and McDonald’s on cluttered Route 30, has been part of Pulcini’s balancing act.

“I’ve always straddled worlds, no matter where I’ve been,” he says. “And I think that that’s why spirituality became such an important part of my identity. There has to be something fundamental in you that enables you to see who you are and what you do against a backdrop of something other than your own experience and your own ideas and your own identity. There has to be something larger that unifies the whole thing. Otherwise, life becomes just a very disintegrative bunch of tasks or encounters. If there’s something that integrates it, I think that’s what spirituality provides.”

To view an audio slideshow of one of Father Pulcini¹s services, visit "The 2-in-1 Audio Slideshow."

To listen in on Senior Editor Sherri Kimmel¹s interview with Professor/Priest Ted Pulcini, visit "The Cover Story Conversation."