Mihail Neamțu (), born 1978, is a Romanian conservative politician. He received a PhD in theology from King's College London and has written several books on politics, religion, and culture. Life and career Family and political awakenings Born in 1978 in Făgăraș, a city at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, Mihail Neamțu had a first-hand experience of communism, an ideology which he often described in harsh pejorative terms. His mother, Emilia, was a school teacher and his father, Gheorghe, was a computer engineer. Neamțu also has a brother, who is a painter. Early on in his life, his paternal grandfather introduced him to the elaborate rituals of Orthodox Christianity, which included a morning Easter service, as well as an exposition of the biblical teachings about life and death. On 21 December 1989, on the western frontier of Romania with Hungary, Mihail's father directly faced the lethal threats of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s army, made of gunmen, soldiers, tanks, and military trucks. This left a lasting impression on Mihail's political imagination. Since then, he saw liberty ‘as the most important gift in life’. Education and academic career In 1996, at the age of 17, he won the First Prize in the National Contest for Philosophy. In his undergraduate studies, Neamțu acquired an elementary knowledge of Greek and Latin, while being drawn to German hermeneutics and French phenomenology. After having completed his B.A degree at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Neamțu went to study theology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. There, he developed a keen interest in the patristic era by looking at the development of Christian doctrine between 325 and 381 A.D. His extensive readings included the works of Greek and Latin Church Fathers, such as Irenaeus of Lyon, Athanasius the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine of Hippo, as well as Evagrius of Pontus, John Damascene and Gregory Palamas. In parallel, the social conditions of former Soviet countries, as well as the vivid memories of his own life under dictatorship, moved Neamțu's intellectual focus in the area of Western political philosophy. Thus, he became acquainted with the great classical tradition, from Plato and Aristotle to Baruch Spinoza, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He gradually developed a critical view of radical modernity, because he believes the latter divorces reason from faith, personal virtue and public legality, economic flourishing and civic duty, sex from love, the visible