Russian Orthodox Presence in Hong Kong

It is, perhaps, an "Orientalist" mentality that leads some to assume the "ethnic" churches of the East never bother with peoples not a part of their ethnos beyond their borders, but this is false in all sorts of instances going back centuries. It is still false today as a new book, set for early September release, reminds us: The Russian Orthodox Community in Hong Kong: Religion, Ethnicity, and Intercultural Relations by Loretta E. Kim and Chengyi Zhou (Lexington Books, 2021), 301pp.  

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Hong Kong has been a unique society from its establishment as a political region separate from mainland China in the nineteenth century under British colonial rule until the present day as a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China. A hub of interregional and international migration, it has been the temporary and long-term home of people belonging to many racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. This book examines the evolution of the community established by clergy and congregants of the Russian Orthodox Church. This community was first developed in the 1930s and then revived after a hiatus of over two decades from the 1970s to the 1990s with the founding of the Orthodox Parish of Apostles Saints Peter and Paul (OPASPP) at the turn of the twenty-first century. This study demonstrates how the OPASPP has become a vital provider of knowledge about Russian language and culture as well as a religious institution serving both heritage and convert believers. The community formed by and around the OPASPP is important to foster Sino-Russian relations based on individual-to-individual contact and mutual exposure to Chinese and Russian cultures in a region of China which allows spiritual and social diversity with minimal political constraints.

Ukrainian National Identity

Though even in 2016 one still finds Russians and their apologists sneering at the very idea of Ukraine as an independent country and Ukrainians as a distinctive ethno-national group, the history of both goes back farther than some today may wish to admit. Set for October release is a new book that shows the historical roots of Ukrainian national identity are deeper than previously thought: Johannes Remy, Brothers or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movement and Russia from the 1840s to the 1870s (University of Toronto Press, 2016), 336pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Contrary to the prevailing opinion, the idea of Ukrainian independence did not emerge at the end of the nineteenth-century. In Brothers and Enemies, Johannes Remy reveals that the roots of Ukrainian independence were planted fifty years earlier.

Remy contextualizes the Ukrainian national movement against the backdrop of the Russian Empire and its policy of oppression in the mid-nineteenth-century. Remy utilizes a wide range of unpublished archival sources to shed light on topics that are absent from current discourse including: Ilarion Vasilchikov’s alliance with Ukrainian activists in 1861, the forged revolutionary proclamation used to deport Pavlo Chubynsky (who is known today as the author of the Ukrainian national anthem), and the 1864 negotiations between Kyiv activists and the Polish National Government. Brothers and Enemies is the first systematic study of imperial censorship policies during the period and will be of interest to those who seek a better understanding of the current Ukrainian-Russian conflict.

Nationalism in the 19th Century

Nobody who has any interest in or understanding of Christianity in the East can avoid for very long the sorry task of contending with ethno-nationalism in its various forms. I have a paper coming out later this year in Pro Ecclesia on the ecclesiological problems created by nationalism as it emerges in post-revolutionary France and then spreads to various places under French influence (the Levant, Syria), to Russia (through Joseph de Maistre's long ambassadorship there), and then especially to newly created nation-states emerging in the sunset of the Ottoman Empire in southern Europe and the Balkans. I am keen therefore to read this newly published book under Lucian Leustean's editorship, Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe (Fordham UP, 2014), 256pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Nation-building processes in the Orthodox commonwealth brought together political institutions and religious communities in their shared aims of achieving national sovereignty. Chronicling how the churches of Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia acquired independence from the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the wake of the Ottoman Empire's decline, Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe examines the role of Orthodox churches in the construction of national identities. Drawing on archival material available after the fall of communism in southeastern Europe and Russia, as well as material published in Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Russian,Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe analyzes the challenges posed by nationalism to the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the ways in which Orthodox churches engaged in the nationalist ideology.

Converts to Orthodoxy

I am delighted to read of the forthcoming book by the Orthodox priest and scholar Oliver Herbel, whom I met last year and some of whose scholarship Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies published recently: Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church (Oxford University Press, 2013), 256pp.

About this book we are told:

Recent years have seen increasing numbers of Protestant and Catholic Christians converting to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. In this book D. Oliver Herbel examines Christian converts to Orthodoxy who served as exemplars and leaders for convert movements in America during the twentieth century. These convert groups include Carpatho Rusyns, African Americans, and Evangelicals.
Religious mavericks have a long history in America--a tradition of being anti-tradition. Converts to orthodoxy reject such individualism by embracing an ancient form of Christianity even as they exemplify it by choosing their own religious paths. Drawing on archival resources including Rusyn and Russian newspapers, unpublished internal church documents, personal archives, and personal interviews, Herbel presents a close examination of the theological reasons for the exemplary converts' own conversions as well as the reasons they offered to persuade those who followed them. He considers the conversions within the context of the American anti-tradition, and of racial and ethnic tensions in America. This book offers the first serious investigation of this important trend in American religion and the first in-depth investigation of any kind of African-American Orthodoxy.

This will likely build on the important work begun by Amy Slagle, whose book I reviewed here. 

I greatly look forward to reading this, and then to interviewing the author (whom I previously interviewed here about his earlier book).

Visions of Community

Ashgate has just put into my hands a very hefty tome, a collection of articles--most in English but a few in German--edited by Walter Pohl, Clemens Gantner, and Richard Payne: Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World: The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300-1100 (Ashgate, 2012), 575pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us:

This volume looks at 'visions of community' in a comparative perspective, from Late Antiquity to the dawning of the age of crusades. It addresses the question of why and how distinctive new political cultures developed after the disintegration of the Roman World, and to what degree their differences had already emerged in the first post-Roman centuries. The Latin West, Orthodox Byzantium and its Slavic periphery, and the Islamic world each retained different parts of the Graeco-Roman heritage, while introducing new elements. For instance, ethnicity became a legitimizing element of rulership in the West, remained a structural element of the imperial periphery in Byzantium, and contributed to the inner dynamic of Islamic states without becoming a resource of political integration. Similarly, the political role of religion also differed between the emerging post-Roman worlds. It is surprising that little systematic research has been done in these fields so far. The 32 contributions of the volume explore this new line of research and look at different aspects of the process, with leading western Medievalists, Byzantinists and Islamicists covering a wide range of pertinent topics. At a closer look, some of the apparent differences between the West and the Islamic world seem less distinctive, and the inner variety of all post-Roman societies becomes more marked. At the same time, new variations in the discourse of community and the practice of power emerge. Anybody interested in the development of the post-Roman Mediterranean, but also in the relationship between the Islamic World and the West, will gain new insights from these studies on the political role of ethnicity and religion in the post-Roman Mediterranean.

In perusing the table of contents, I see numerous articles that will be of interest to scholars interested in Eastern Christian realities and the often vexatious questions of "ethnicity" that dog many Eastern Churches:

• Bernhard Palme, "Political Identity versus Religious Distinction? The Case of Egypt in the Later Roman Empire," which begins post-Chalcedon
• Bas ter Haar Romeny, "Ethnicity, Ethnogenesis, and the Identity of Syriac Orthodox Christians"
• Lynn Jones, "Truth and Lies, Ceremonial and Art: Issues of Nationality in Medieval Armenia"
• Hartmut Leppin, "Roman Identity in a Border Region: Evagrius and the Defense of the Roman Empire"
• George Hatke, "Holy Land and Sacred History: a View from early Ethiopia"
• Ralph-Johannes Lilie, "Zur Stellung von ethnischen und religiösen Minderheiten in Byzanz: Armenier, Muslime und Paulikianer"
• John Haldon and Hugh Kennedy, "Regional Identities and Military Power: Byzantium and Islam ca. 600-750. 
• Alexander Beihammer, "Strategies of Identification and Distinction in the Byzantine Discourse on the Seljuk Turks"

Romantic Nationalism

It is, as I have noted before, something of a commonplace that ethno-nationalism plays a rather large, and often deleterious, role in Eastern Christianity. Along comes a new book that looks at modern expressions of such nationalism in Eastern Europe: Serhiy Bilenky, Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford University Press, 2012), 408pp.
This book, the publisher tells us,

explores the political imagination of Eastern Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, when Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian intellectuals came to identify themselves as belonging to communities known as nations or nationalities. Bilenky approaches this topic from a transnational perspective, revealing the ways in which modern Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian nationalities were formed and refashioned through the challenges they presented to one another, both as neighboring communities and as minorities within a given community. Further, all three nations defined themselves as a result of their interactions with the Russian and Austrian empires. Fueled by the Romantic search for national roots, they developed a number of separate yet often overlapping and inclusive senses of national identity, thereby producing myriad versions of Russianness, Polishness, and Ukrainianness.

The Ottomans

As we are rapidly coming on the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, we are seeing new books examining the legacy of that event which more than any other shaped the last century and continues to shape the world we live in today. A recent collection, edited by Jørgen S. Nielsen, looks at the collapse of one of the empires in which large numbers of Eastern Christians--Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and others--found themselves: Religion, Ethnicity and Contested Nationhood in the Former Ottoman Space (Brill, 2011), 294pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

There has been a growing interest in recent years in reviewing the continued impact of the Ottoman empire even long after its demise at the end of the First World War. The wars in former Yugoslavia, following hot on the civil war in Lebanon, were reminders that the settlements of 1918-22 were not final. While many of the successor states to the Ottoman empire, in east and west, had been built on forms of nationalist ideology and rhetoric opposed to the empire, a newer trend among historians has been to look at these histories as Ottoman provincial history. The present volume is an attempt to bring some of those histories from across the former Ottoman space together. They cover from parts of former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece to Lebanon, including Turkey itself, providing rich material for comparing regions which normally are not compared.