The Journal of Joy, the seminal work by Father Nicolae Steinhardt, has been released in a new English edition by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press in New York.
The translation was done by Paul Boboc, with revisions by Peter Andronache.
Contributors to the revisions and explanatory notes include Bogdan G. Bucur, Nicolae Drăgușin, Brenda Mikitish, and Răzvan Porumb, the Deputy Director of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, who also wrote the book’s preface.
For more details, visit the publisher’s official website.
After months of anticipation, Journal of Joy by Nicolae Steinhardt has finally arrived from the printers!
Discover a spirit of kindness, dignity, and resilience in Steinhardt’s remarkable testimony. Get your copy today and experience the joy that endures. https://t.co/S4XF9oQaP5 pic.twitter.com/wsDGD5FWLc— SVS Press (@SVSPress) December 17, 2024
The Journal of Joy is one of the most widely translated Romanian books, with versions in Italian, Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, Greek, Hungarian, Hebrew, and German.
Biography
Nicu Steinhardt, known in his later monastic years as Father Nicolae de la Rohia, was born in 1912 near Bucharest to Jewish parents. A refined scholar who had established himself as one of the most erudite voices of his generation, he was imprisoned by the repressive communist regime in 1960.
Steinhardt asked to be baptized in his cell—“illicitly”—and eventually found profound joy amid the suffering and despair of the prison. After an extraordinary experience of Christ, the intense happiness accompanying him perpetually transfigured the cruel and gloomy surroundings into a luminous world permeated by God’s love and grace—which is why writing the Journal in the early 1970s was essential, even in the knowledge the communists would ban it.
Nicolae Steinhardt, then a monk at Rohia, passed away in March 1989, nine months before the 1989 December Revolution toppled the communist dictatorship.
Photo: Bogdan Bucur
