Sex and Spirituality in Russia

As I've noted before, questions of sex and gender are all the rage in religious studies today--though such studies for the Christian East still lag behind the many such studies on Western Christianity. Now Brill brings out a new book remedying this in part:

Anna Lisa Crone,  Eros and Creativity in Russian Religious Renewal: the Philosophers and the Freudians (Brill, 2010), xiv+266pp.

Crone's volume focuses on the work of Vladimir Solovyov, Vasily Rozanov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Boris Vysheslavtsev, arguing that in the aftermath of Freud, these four work to re-emphasize Christianity as a religion of flesh and spirit. I've asked Judith Deutsch Kornblatt of the U. of Wisconsin's Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literature to review this in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2012.

Slavophilia and Philosophy

Cambridge U. Press has just brought out an impressive-looking collection:

G.M. Hamburg and R.A. Poole, eds., A History of Russian Philosophy 1830-1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity (CUP, 2010), 440pp. 


This book deals with what it calls "the great age of Russian philosophy" that includes the rise of the Slavophiles. In 18 chapters the main people, schools, and controversies of the period are covered. Much of the debate continues to resonate today as all cultures grapple with the meaning of human dignity, especially in the face of the many technological challenges of our age. I've asked the scholar and Ruthenian priest Robert Slesinski, who has published extensively on East-Slavic philosophers, especially Pavel Florensky, to review this for us in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2011.