University Vice-Rector to Speak
in Philly Area
For more information, please contact Tessa Kocan at kocan@ucef.org; phone: (773) 235-8462.
Biography of Myroslav Marynovych
Mr. Marynovych was born in 1949 in the Lviv Region. He graduated from Middle School #2 in Drohobych. He earned a degree from the Electrophysics Faculty of Lviv Polytechnic University (1967-1972).
In November 1979 he joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (Human Rights Watch). For this membership first he was dismissed from his job at the Tekhnika Publishing House in Kyiv. Then on April 23, 1977, he was arrested. In the town of Vasylko, near Kyiv, he was sentenced in March 1978 in violation of articles 62 and 70 of the Criminal Code of the USSR (for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”) to seven years in a camp of strict regime and five years of exile. He served out his term of imprisonment in camp 336 in the village of Kuchyno in the Chusov District, Perm Region, Russia. He was in exile in the village of Saralzhyn, Aktiubin Region, Kazakhstan; but at the initiative of Gorbachev he and some 200 other political prisoners were released ahead of time (at first he was forgiven and then in 1991 rehabilitated).
After he returned to Ukraine he worked for three years (1987 – 1990) as an operator at the Drohobych petroleum refinery. After the victory of the democratic forces in the 1990 election, Marynovch’s life radically changed. He worked as a correspondent for the Drohobych newspaper Halych Star and later also taught a course of lectures, “The History of Christianity in Ukraine,” at the Drohobych Pedagogical University.
He continued activities in the field of human rights’ defense. In 1991 he became involved in the activities of Amnesty International in Ukraine. In 1993 he became a founder of the Ukrainian association of Amnesty International and the first head of its national committee (which he served as until 1997).
He has taken part in many national and international academic conferences (including in the U.S., France, Italy, Israel, Australia, and Germany). His main interests are religious studies and national and political processes. From September 1996 until March 1997 he interned as a Pew Fellow at Columbia University (New York), and Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia) in the program “Religion, religious freedom, and human rights,” and also at the World Council of Churches in Geneva.
He is the author of two collections of essays, Ukraine on the Margins of Sacred Scripture (Drohobych, 1991) and Ukraine: Road through the Desert (Kharkiv, 1993), and also the booklets “Human Rights,” “Atoning for Communism,” and numerous publications in Ukrainian and foreign periodicals. In 2003 his book The Ukrainian Idea and Christianity, or When the Colored Horses of the Apocalypse Prance was published and in 2004 the English-language book An Ecumenist Analyzes the History and Prospects of Religion in Ukraine. In 2009 his book Jesus and the People of God: Jews and Christians in the Community of Salvation (Lviv: Svichado) was published.
He was honored by the journal Suchasnist (“Modernity”) for excellent political science research. He received the Valerii Marchenko award in 1995 for best publication in the field of human rights’ defense, the Vladimir Zeyev-Zhabotinsky Award from the Ukraine-Israel Society (1999), the order “for intellectual courage” from the chapter of the journal YI (2004), and the order “for services to the Ukrainian people” from the People’s Movement of Ukraine (2005). He received the state order of Ukraine “for bravery,” first degree (2006). From the Republic of Poland he received the Equestrian Order of the Cross “for merit”(2006) and the Ukrainian state order “freedom.” The Drohobych City Council named him “Honored Citizen of Drohobych” (2010).
He received a Marion Duenhof fellowship from Wuerzburg University in Germany (2005), and was a Kolaska Fellow at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada (2006).
Starting on October 1, 1997, he served as director of the Institute of Religion and Society of the Ukrainian Catholic University and on October 3, 2007, he became the institute’s president. Since the summer of 2000 he has served (in chronological order) as the university’s vice-rector for external relations, senior vice-rector, and now vice-rector for university mission.
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