Academic Background

Meins G.S. Coetsier graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Philosophy in 2004 and subsequently with a Master’s Degree in 2006 from The Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy, a Recognised College of the National University of Ireland. He was invited by Professor Klaas A.D. Smelik to assist and develop the international Etty Hillesum Research Centre, EHOC, at Ghent University, of which he is now a member of staff. In 2011, he completed his four-year FWO research project (2007-2011) which provides a framework for understanding Etty Hillesum's spiritual search and her Diaries and Letters 1941-1943 in the light of Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In 2012, Coetsier was awarded the degree Doctor of Comparative Science of Cultures at Ghent University for this study.

In 2008 Coetsier was awarded the Doctorate in Philosophy at Ghent University by the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, on the basis of a study on Eric Voegelin’s Philosophy of Luminous Participation in the Transcendent Ground of Being. As a result his promoter, Prof. Dr. Ronald Commers of UGent inspired him to develop the Centre of Eric Voegelin Studies at Ghent University in order to promote Voegelin’s work in Europe.The Centre for Eric Voegelin Studies at the Ugent collaborates with the Eric Voegelin Society world wide, the Eric-Voegelin-Archiv (Munich, Germany) and the Eric Voegelin Institute (Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA).

Since 2007 Coetsier's annual attendance at and his research papers presented to the Eric Voegelin Society meetings during the annual gatherings of the American Political Science Association, the APSA, have  been academically formative and personally germane in focusing his research on philosophical mysticism and on the politics of resistance, two pillars of Voegelin’s philosophy. His first book Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis was published by University of Missouri Press in 2008.