Monastic Experiences in Byzantium

The University of Notre Dame Press catalogue for spring 2019 has just been released, and in it we spy such forthcoming gems as Alice-Mary Talbot, Varieties of Monastic Experience in Byzantium, 800-1453 (April, 2019), 292pp. For those who follow the academic study of Byzantium in North America, Talbot's name is very familiar as the director emerita of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks and editor of the Byzantine Greek series of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library in which she has published such works as Byzantine Defenders of Images: Eight Saints' Lives in English Translation as well as Holy Men of Mt. Athos, inter alia.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

In this unprecedented introduction to Byzantine monasticism, based on the Conway Lectures she delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 2014, Alice-Mary Talbot surveys the various forms of monastic life in the Byzantine Empire between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. It includes chapters on male monastic communities (mostly cenobitic, but some idiorrhythmic in late Byzantium), nuns and nunneries, hermits and holy mountains, and a final chapter on alternative forms of monasticism, including recluses, stylites, wandering monks, holy fools, nuns disguised as monks, and unaffiliated monks and nuns.

This original monograph does not attempt to be a history of Byzantine monasticism but rather emphasizes the multiplicity of ways in which Byzantine men and women could devote their lives to service to God, with an emphasis on the tension between the two basic modes of monastic life, cenobitic and eremitic. It stresses the individual character of each Byzantine monastic community in contrast to the monastic orders of the Western medieval world, and yet at the same time demonstrates that there were more connections between certain groups of monasteries than previously realized. The most original sections include an in-depth analysis of the challenges facing hermits in the wilderness, and special attention to enclosed monks (recluses) and urban monks and nuns who lived independently outside of monastic complexes. Throughout, Talbot highlights some of the distinctions between the monastic life of men and women, and makes comparisons of Byzantine monasticism with its Western medieval counterpart.

St Cyprian of Carthage and the College of Bishops

Does anyone today like bishops, or see them as anything other than a corrupt bunch of self-serving gangsters and sexual abusers? If your local one is okay, what about his being yoked to his brothers? Can the Church retreat into local structures and communities and ignore the wider corruption? If not, what should we do then?

These are not new questions, as we see in a new book, St. Cyprian of Carthage and the College of Bishops by Benjamin Safranski (Fortress Academic, 2018), 250pp. I am especially gratified to see how much this new book is indebted to Afanasiev, who is no stranger to these parts.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This book assesses episcopal cooperation as envisioned by the third-century bishop Cyprian of Carthage. It outlines and assesses the interactions between local bishops, provincial groups of bishops, and the worldwide college. Assessing these interactions sheds light on the relationship between Cyprian’s strong sense of local autonomy and the reality that each bishop was responsible to the world-wide college. Episcopal consensus was the sine qua non, for Cyprian, for a major issue of faith or practice to become one that defined membership in the college and, ultimately, the Church.

The book brings this assessment into a modern scholarly debate by concluding with an evaluation of the ecclesiology of the Orthodox scholar Nicolas Afanasiev and his critiques of Cyprian. Afanasiev lamented Cyprian as the father of universal ecclesiology and claimed that Cyprian’s college wielded authority above that of the local bishop. This book argues that Afanasiev fundamentally misconstrued Cyprian’s understanding of collegiality. It is shown that, for Cyprian, collegiality was the framework for the common ministry of the bishops and did not infringe on the sovereignty of the local bishop. Rather, it was the college’s collective duty to define the boundaries of acceptable Christian belief and practice.

Slavoj Žižek and Christianity

Routledge is one of the most important publishers around today, especially in the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theology, all of which come together in this newly released volume, Slavoj Žižek and Christianity, edited by Sotiris Mitralexis and Dionysios Skliris (2018), vii+230pp.

And for those who do not know him, Žižek  is also one of the most important figures writing today at the intersection of those three disciplines. His work comes in for scrutiny and dialogue in this volume, which features contributions from several Eastern Christians, and those conversant in recent developments in Eastern Christian theology.

The editors do a nice job in the introduction explaining the relevance of engaging a man who identifies as a Marxist communist atheist, but who nonetheless maintains that there is much of value in Christian theology for both philosophy and psychoanalysis. Moreover, Žižek offers a welcome critique of Christianity which helps it recover its emancipatory power and potential outside of its too-frequent institutionalization and accommodation to imperial and other worldly powers.

In his chapter, "From Psychoanalysis to Metamorphosis," Brian Becker pursues a line very much in keeping with what I have been arguing for several years now: theology and psychoanalysis need each other and have much to offer each other, not least in dealing with questions of finitude and uncertainty stemming from unconscious ideas and desires. When we approach limits, as analysis certainly does in its confrontation with what is not known because not conscious, theology offers a way forward beyond the impasse. Becker makes use of a number of interesting sources in his chapter, including John Zizioulas's Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church.

In his chapter,"Pacifist Pluralism vs. Militant Truth," Haralambos Ventis of the University of Athens also notes, as several other authors do, the similarities of Marxist and Christian critiques of social structures. Here Ventis draws on the fascinating figure of Cornelius Castoriadis  and his landmark book The Imaginary Institution of Society (The MIT Press, 1998), as well as a whole cast of other equally fascinating and influential figures, including Terry Eagleton (The Illusions of Postmodernism). the father of modern hermeneutics, Paul Ricoeur (especially in his Oneself as Another), and the widely influential moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who should need no introduction around these parts. Ventis in particular draws on MacIntyre's under-appreciated 1999 book Dependent Rational Animals, which I have sometimes used with undergraduates, who find it an easier introduction than After Virtue. 

There is much in this chapter that is also connected to very recent and ongoing debates over the supposed terminal decline of liberalism today. Here Ventis draws on a number of contemporary Greek Orthodox theologians, including Pantelis Kalaitzidis, author of Orthodoxy and Political Theology.

The author concludes very succinctly and soberly by noting that "leftist" critics of Christianity are useful in reminding the latter of its duty to work against injustice and to repent of those many times when the Church has sided with those perpetuating injustice against, e.g., the poor. But equally he reminds those critics that they cannot abandon eschatology to create the Kingdom of God on earth for any and all attempts at doing so end up "creating hell."

In Bruce Kajewski's short but really intriguing chapter, "Murder at the Vicarage," he draws out the relationship between Žižek and Chesterton of all people, especially in the latter's fictional character Fr. Brown, the priest who solves murder mysteries and other crimes. (The BBC rendition of some of those stories, available on Netflix, has been a source of delight to my children. It often guts much of the theology, but does not make a total hash of things--although its liturgical scenes are absurdly anachronistic.) The chapter makes some bracing claims, but could have done with further elaboration, especially of what it calls "the linkage among violence, capitalism, and Christianity."

In his chapter, "Žižek and the Dwarf: A Short-Circuit Radical Theology," Mike Grimshaw looks at and situates himself as part of Žižek's idea of a "community of the Holy Spirit," a community that consists in part of atheists who have rejected the idea of God as a Big Other, and who want almost nothing to do with the conservative, reactionary and often self-serving institutions of Christianity like the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Rather, this community wants to be part of the "ethics of revolutionary love." Grimshaw's title and chapter is obviously heavily indebted to The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity as well as to The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?. 

Both of those books are by Žižek, who provides a brief Afterword to Slavoj Žižek and Christianity.It starts off with a bracing engagement of Pope Francis, moves almost immediately to the moral implications of the murder of Reinhard Heydrich, and then looks at the lessons of the book of Job--all in the context of considering the role of temptation and its relationship to the good. Žižek sees the book of Job as the first systematic critique of ideology and its tendency to rationalize meaningless suffering. This is wonderfully bracing stuff, and it only gets better.

Žižek, far from being bothered by the idiocies in Job and other parts of the Bible, says Christianity must keep them: "they are the very stuff which confers on Christianity the unbearable tensions of a true life" (222).

From here, he concludes on a note that will irk a lot of Eastern Christians (and those in the West increasingly coming to appreciate deification): he denounces theosis/deification/divinization. I won't give away what he says, but it's a definitive declaration made in his fulgurating style before lighting on to another topic and then quickly ending.

Religious Minorities in the Middle East

It's been out for almost a year, but I just came across a collection of articles, The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East, edited by John Eibner and published last year by Lexington Books (276pp.).

Other books and collections that treat this topic do not seem to have the wide-ranging scope of this one, which I'm looking forward to reading.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East addresses the domestic and international politics that have created conditions for contemporary religious cleansing in the Middle East. It provides a platform for a host of distinguished scholars, journalists, human rights activists, and political practitioners. The contributors come from diverse political, cultural, and religious backgrounds; each one drawing on a deep wellspring of scholarship, experience, sobriety, and passion. Collectively, they make a major contribution to understanding the dynamics of the mortal threat to the social pluralism upon which the survival of religious minorities depends.

Augustine's Confessions: A New Translation

Augustine of Hippo occupies a famously ambivalent place in certain Eastern Christian circles. As a rough rule of thumb, one may estimate that the higher the percentage of polemics he attracts from Orthodox, the higher the certainty that he has never been read comprehensively in original critical editions. Instead, like other major Western figures--one thinks immediately of Anselm and Aquinas in this regard--he has been traduced by ignorant apologists. Much of this was addressed in a volume that's been out for a decade now, but remains absolutely crucial: Orthodox Readings of Augustine, eds.  George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (Fordham University Press, 2008).

But regardless of what one thinks of Augustine's theology--if, indeed, one can use such a term and assume thereby to have captured something simple and singular in so vast a corpus of writings--he has profoundly shaped the world we live in through his City of God as well as his Confessions--to say nothing of myriad other works. And no person considering oneself reasonably educated in antique literature can ignore The Confessions, which have, of course, often been described as the first major Western "autobiography" or reflection on one's inner life. They may be that, but they are much more than that.

They have also been regularly released in translation from major and minor scholars. Along comes another new translation which is the subject of a searching and laudatory review by Adam Phillips (who always attracts attention in these parts) in a recent edition of the London Review of Books which I read with great interest. While recognizing the uses of other major translators (including especially that of Henry Chadwick), Phillips commends to us Confessions: A New Translation by Peter Constantine (Liveright, 2018), 368pp. He notes that Constantine's translation helps us more sharply realize just how unreliable language is in and for Augustine, and how inadequate all our attempts to describe our searching for and desiring of Him who is beyond our categories of language and being.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

No modern, well-versed literature lover can call her education complete without having read Augustine’s Confessions. One of the most original works of world literature, it is the first autobiography ever written, influencing writers from Montaigne to Rousseau, Virginia Woolf to Gertrude Stein―and most recently informing Stephen Greenblatt’s provocative thesis about one of our foundational mythologies in The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. It is here that we learn how one of the greatest saints in Christendom overcame a wild and reckless past, complete with a rambunctious posse of friends, an overly doting mother, and an affair that produced a “bastard” child. Yet English translators have long emphasized the ecclesiastical virtues of Augustine’s masterpiece, often at the expense of its passion and literary vigor. Restoring the lyricism of Augustine’s original language, Peter Constantine offers a masterful and elegant rendering of Confessions in what will be a classic for decades to come.

But the End of the Beginning: on the Centenary of the End of the Great War

More than five years ago now, I noted that the eve of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War was already occasioning a slew of new books from publishers. Without in any way pretending to be an historian of that conflict in all its complexity, I have nonetheless read a great deal for many years now, some of it connected with lectures I gave on the centenary of the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides of 1915 at the hands of the Ottomans. I am convinced, as many other historians are, that the First World War shaped everything that came after it, and shapes us still. The person who has argued this most persuasively--at least among those I have read--is the Cambridge historian David Reynolds, particularly in the book, The Long Shadow, which I noted here.

In anticipation of today's anniversary of the end of the fighting, I recently finished a book that has been out for some time: Joseph Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, World War I and Its Violent Climax (Random House, 2004). It's a not bad book, though its format takes some getting used to as the author jumps back and forth, sketching individual characters or units on 11 November 1918 and then earlier in the war to see where they were, how they changed, and whether they survived to the end or not.

A just-released book also focuses on this particular day: Guy Cuthbertson, Peace at Last: A Portrait of Armistice Day 1918 (Yale UP, 2018), 304pp. I look forward to reading it.

One of the men in Persico's book, as he is of course in myriad others, is General Haig, a man for whom it is almost impossible to have any sympathy. (I have, I suppose, been influenced in my judgment by the ferocious attack on British army leaders in The Donkeys by Alan Clark--he of the uproarious diaries.) Haig is featured in a new study released this spring by Jonathan Boff, Haig's Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany's War on the Western Front (OUP, 2018).

Boff's book is featured in the history catalogue sent to me in October from Oxford University Press. In it they are featuring a number of new and forthcoming books connected to the end of the war.

Coming out early next year is Owen Davies, A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination, and Faith during the First World War (OUP, 2019), 304pp. About this book the publisher tells us the following:

It was a commonly expressed view during the First World War that the conflict had seen a major revival of "superstitious" beliefs and practices.

Churches expressed concerns about the wearing of talismans and amulets, the international press paid considerable interest to the pronouncements of astrologers and prophets, and the authorities in several countries periodically clamped down on fortune tellers and mediums due to concerns over their effect on public morale. Out on the battlefields, soldiers of all nations sought to protect themselves through magical and religious rituals, and, on the home front, people sought out psychics and occult practitioners for news of the fate of their distant loved ones or communication with their spirits. Even away from concerns about the war, suspected witches continued to be abused and people continued to resort to magic and magical practitioners for personal protection, love, and success.

Uncovering and examining beliefs, practices, and contemporary opinions regarding the role of the supernatural in the war years, Owen Davies explores the broader issues regarding early twentieth-century society in the West, the psychology of the supernatural during wartime, and the extent to which the war cast a spotlight on the widespread continuation of popular belief in magic. A Supernatural War reveals the surprising stories of extraordinary people in a world caught up with the promise of occult powers.

Davies' book immediately puts me in mind of a similar study, that of Phillip Jenkins' The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade, which was published in 2014. It is a fascinating book I have often recommended to others and returned to many times, not least for its insight that Catholics, so hysterical about some apparent happenings in some obscure Portuguese village, were far from alone in claiming divine apparitions: it was a game that everybody got in on, with French atheists in foxholes claiming visions of their dead comrades in arms; Russian Orthodox peasants claiming divine visions; staid German Lutherans and English Anglicans also had their own supposed apparitions; and even Muslims were also claiming to have had visions.

Another book just out this month will also disabuse us of common assumptions today about the supposed origins of "fake news" under Trump. Au contraire, as Gill Bennett suggests in The Zinoviev Letter: the Conspiracy that Never Dies. About this book Oxford tells us this:

This is the story of one of the most enduring conspiracy theories in British politics, an intrigue that still has resonance nearly a century after it was written: the Zinoviev Letter of 1924. Almost certainly a forgery, no original has ever been traced, and even if genuine it was probably Soviet fake news. Despite this, the Letter still haunts British politics nearly a century after it was written, the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and cropping up in the media as recently as during the Referendum campaign and the 2017 general election.

The Letter, encouraging the British proletariat to greater revolutionary fervor, was apparently sent by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Bolshevik propaganda organization, to the British Communist Party in September 1924. Sent to London through British Secret Intelligence Service channels, it arrived during the general election campaign and was leaked to the press. The Letter's publication by the Daily Mail on October 25th 1924 just before the General Election humiliated the first ever British Labour government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, when its political opponents used it to create a "Red Scare" in the media. Labour blamed the Letter for its defeat, insisting there had been a right-wing establishment conspiracy, and many in the Labour Party have never forgotten it. 

The Zinoviev Letter has long been a symbol of political dirty tricks and what we would now call "fake news". But it is also a gripping historical detective story of spies and secrets, fraud and forgery, international subversion and the nascent global conflict between communism and capitalism.

When the war ended, the armistice was of course signed at Versailles. That treaty is the subject of a recent Oxford UP book by Michael Neiberg, The Treaty of Versailles: A Concise History. I look forward to reading it in due course.

But Versailles was preceded by half a year of hard slogging among various powers in Paris. That process was covered by the superlative and unsurpassable book by  Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. which I have read three times with delight. It has justly won several awards.

Christianity in Iraq in the 15th Century

If nothing else has come out of the disaster which Iraq has been for fifteen years now since the neo-imperial American invasion, perhaps one might find some glimmer of good in the slightly increased (relatively speaking) awareness by American Christians of the age-old Christian presence in that country and surrounding region. Much of that Christian population has, of course, been destroyed since the war of 2003; much of it has fled. In his very useful new book Ecumenism of Blood, about which more another time, Hugh Somerville Knapman notes that in 2003 there were "1.4 million Christians" in Iraq, but by 2016 that number was "reduced to 275,000."

That much-reduced population has long roots, and a book set for release at the end of December will focus on one period of that population's history: Thomas A. Carlson, Christianity in Fifteenth-Century Iraq (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization, 2018), 322pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Christians in fifteenth-century Iraq and al-Jazīra were socially and culturally home in the Middle East, practicing their distinctive religion despite political instability. This insightful book challenges the normative Eurocentrism of scholarship on Christianity and the Islamic exceptionalism of much Middle Eastern history to reveal the often unexpected ways in which inter-religious interactions were peaceful or violent in this region. The multifaceted communal self-concept of the 'Church of the East' (so-called 'Nestorians') reveals cultural integration, with certain distinctive features. The process of patriarchal succession clearly borrowed ideas from surrounding Christian and Muslim groups, while public rituals and communal history reveal specifically Christian responses to concerns shared with Muslim neighbors. Drawing on sources from various languages, including Arabic, Armenian, Persian, and Syriac, this book opens new possibilities for understanding the rich, diverse, and fascinating society and culture that existed in Iraq during this time.

Marriage and Sex in Early Christianity

I confess to growing weariness with the endless focus on sexual issues today and the endless policing of and editorializing about the same. But I have none of those fears in approaching a new book by David Hunter, whom I know personally to be a first-rate scholar of antique Christianity, treating issues with the serene and objective regard that characterizes historical scholarship at its best.

He is the editor of the newly released collection, Marriage and Sexuality in Early Christianity (Fortress Press, 2018), 272pp.

About this collection the publisher tells us this:

Marriage and Sexuality in Early Christianity is part of Ad Fontes: Early Christian Sources, a series designed to present ancient Christian texts essential to an understanding of Christian theology, ecclesiology, and practice. The books in the series make the wealth of early Christian thought available to new generations of students of theology and provide a valuable resource for the church. Developed in light of recent patristic scholarship, the volumes provide a representative sampling of theological contributions from both East and West. The series provides volumes that are relevant for a variety of courses: from introduction to theology to classes on doctrine and the development of Christian thought. The goal of each volume is not to be exhaustive but rather to be representative enough to denote for a nonspecialist audience the multivalent character of early Christian thought, allowing readers to see how and why early Christian doctrine and practice developed the way it did.

Medieval Middle Eastern Christians

I've followed the work of the relatively young scholar Jack Tannous for some time, and been consistently impressed. So it is with eager anticipation that I look forward to the publication, next week, of his book The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton University Press, 2018), 664pp.

Bearing a slew of impressive recommendations, including from the well-known Byzantinist Averil Cameron, this book, the publisher tells us, is

A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story.

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history.

What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East.
This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

The Art of Armenia

If you read my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, you will know that I have a special affection for the Armenian Church, whose structures are utterly singular in the Christian world for reasons I go into great detail about.

So Armenia continues to fascinate, and some day I should be delighted to visit that small country that has suffered so much slaughter of the last 1400 years and more.

Oxford University Press has recently published a book by Christine Maranci, The Art of Armenia: An Introduction (OUP, 2018), 272pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Though immediately recognizable in public discourse as a modern state in a political "hot zone," Armenia has a material history and visual culture that reaches back to the Paleolithic era. This book presents a timely and much-needed survey of the arts of Armenia from antiquity to the early eighteenth century C.E. Divided chronologically, it brings into discussion a wide range of media, including architecture, stone sculpture, works in metal, wood, and cloth, manuscript illumination, and ceramic arts. Critically, The Art of Armenia presents this material within historical and archaeological contexts, incorporating the results of specialist literature in various languages. It also positions Armenian art within a range of broader comparative contexts including, but not limited to, the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, Byzantium, the Islamic world, Yuan-dynasty China, and seventeenth-century Europe. The Art of Armenia offers students, scholars, and heritage readers of the Armenian community something long desired but never before available: a complete and authoritative introduction to three thousand years of Armenian art, archaeology, architecture, and design.

Antoine Arjakovsky on Orthodoxy and its Genealogy

I have been a great fan of the work of the Russian Orthodox scholar Antoine Arjakovsky for some time, having previously interviewed him here about this book discussed here. Slowly more and more of his works are making their way into English translation through several North American publishers. One such publisher, Angelico Press, contacted me this past summer asking me to read and provide a blurb for an Arjakovsky book they were about to publish. And now it is here: What is Orthodoxy? A Genealogy of Christian Understanding (Angelico, 2018), 412pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

In this remarkably original work, Antoine Arjakovsky brings us to a discovery of Orthodoxy within the dynamics of history—including the profound crisis that the Christian churches, with their too often congealed identities, are passing through today. Faced with internal tensions and the millennium-old fragmentation of Christendom, the path to a common Christian identity has been rendered all but impossible. Undaunted, Arjakovsky points to the emergence of a new concept of Orthodoxy as “right knowing,” a knowing that unifies what is believed with what is lived, wherever this might be. He is an acute reader of the tensions between the piously political and the truly spiritual in the troubled history of Christendom—East as well as West. The book’s contributions to studies in the history of Christianity, ecumenism, and sophiology offer Christian readers renewed hope in an ecumenical project uninhibited by tired tropes of division and over-rehearsed acrimony. It is a most timely work.

And don't just take my word for the importance of reading Arjakovsky. It comes with a foreword from John Milbank, and then the publisher provides a slew of vastly more impressive "blurbers" than I:

 “Antoine Arjakovsky’s theological, geographic, and diachronic breadth is matched by largeness of heart and deep reflection guided by lived experience and eschatological hope.”—BISHOP BORYS GUDZIAK, Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church

“Antoine Arjakovsky has written a sweeping scholarly account of how the very concept of ‘orthodoxy’ has been approached historically, philosophically, and theologically over the last two millennia. In this rich exploration beyond the closed spheres of confessionalism, heterodoxy versus orthodoxy, and our ‘epistemic ghettos,’ Arjakovsky sees the possibility of ‘a common shared consciousness’ that could open ‘a new ecumenical history of the Church and a new history of philosophy.’”—FR. JOHN A. JILLIONS, Chancellor, Orthodox Church in America

“In this remarkable book, Antoine Arjakovsky shows why a theological Church History is crucial for theological understanding. Orthodoxy is not such, if it is only about right belief. It is, rather, about the participation of human existence and history in the divine and angelic wisdom which is itself a metahistorical drama.”—CATHERINE PICKSTOCK, University of Cambridge

“This volume is no mere historical overview of Orthodox Christianity, but an extraordinary multidimensional exploration of what Orthodoxy has tried to confess and enact of Christ’s Gospel. An exciting, provocative, and most important contribution to theology and church history.”—THE V. REV. MICHAEL PLEKON, Professor Emeritus, City University of New York

“Antoine Arjakovsky’s historical scholarship opens onto an astonishing array of sources, ancient and modern, offering us a vitally important exploration of Orthodoxy that is both theologically faithful and historiographically self-critical.”—A.A.J. DEVILLE, University of Saint Francis

“Antoine Arjakovsky offers a provocation to orthodoxy that is rooted in genuine metanoia, and thus irreducible to the triumphalism of ecclesial bureaucracy and confessional boundaries. An important and highly-recommended work.”—AARON RICHES, Seminario Mayor San Cecilio, Granada, Spain

Bulgarian Orthodoxy Under Communism

We have for the better part of two decades now seen an increasing number of books devoted to post-Soviet realities across central, southern, and eastern Europe. As those regions move further and further away from their communist past it sometimes becomes a bit easier to gain the beginnings of historical-critical perspective on them. A new book, just released, does that for Bulgaria, with chapter on the role of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which continues to struggle even today with its communist past: Bulgaria Under Communism, eds. Ivaylo Znepolski et al., (Routledge, 2018), 476pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The book traces the history of communist Bulgaria from 1944 to 1989. A detailed narrative-cum-study of the history of a political system, it provides a chronological overview of the building of the socialist state from the ground up, its entrenchment into the peaceful routine of everyday life, its inner crises, and its gradual decline and self-destruction. The book is the definitive and the most complete guide to Bulgaria under communism and how the communist system operates on a day-to-day level.

North American Churches and the Cold War

Eerdmans recently put into my hands a very impressive collection edited by Paul Mojzes, North American Churches and the Cold War (2018), 560pp.

It is a substantial collection of considerable size and range. I am especially cheered to see included two sections that one rarely finds in collections like this--or, if one finds them, then they are invariably tiny and begrudging: thus we have a hefty first section devoted entirely to Canadian church history in six chapters; and another section with five chapters devoted to Eastern Orthodox Churches. (Too many collections, if they include either section, usually have one token contribution in it.)

In the former, I recognize with fondness the name of Lois Wilson, author of the chapter "Canadian Churches and the Cold War 1975-90." Growing up in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s, you could hardly avoid the name of Lois Wilson if you paid any attention to both ecclesial and political affairs. She was elected moderator--the first woman to hold that position--of what was then the largest Protestant body in the country, the United Church of Canada. She came out of the social gospel tradition of Western Canada from which, in part, the inspiration for the Canadian universal healthcare system emerged. I met her in the fall of 1990 at a preparatory meeting in Quebec City for those us going to Canberra, Australia in February 1991 for the seventh general assembly of the WCC, of which Wilson was then one of the seven outgoing presidents. Her reputation as a dynamo did not disappoint, and I think I had a mild but instant crush on her.

The latter section, on the Orthodox Churches, contains chapters by names familiar to all, including those I am glad to call friends.

The section leads off with a chapter by Leonid Kishkovsky, "The Orthodox Church in America: Steering Through the Cold War."

This is followed by Nicholas Denysenko (see my recent interview with him here) authors the chapter "Sustaining the Fatherland in Exile: Commemoration and Ritual During the Cold War."

Andrei V. Psarev and Nadieszda Kizenko co-wrote "The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, the Moscow Patriarchate, and Their Participation in Ecumenical Assemblies during the Cold War 1948-64."

Lucian Turcescu, who has written about Orthodox Churches and Cold War (as well as post-Cold War) politics in Romania itself, here authors "Fascists, Communists, Bishops, and Spies: Romanian Orthodox Churches during the Cold War."

D. Oliver Herbal (see my interview with him here about his splendid book Turning to Tradition) rounds out this section with his chapter, "Redressing Religious Freedom: Anti-Communism and the Rejection of Orthodox Christianity as the 'Fourth Major Faith'."

Before and after these two sections, there are chapters on "Evangelical Approaches," "Peace Activities," "Roman Catholic Approaches," "US Mainline Protestant Approaches" and a final section, "Lessons Learned."

All told, as the publisher tells us, this book fills a considerable gap:

History textbooks typically list 1945–1990 as the Cold War years, but it is clear that tensions from that period are still influencing world politics today. While much attention is given to political and social responses to those first nuclear threats, none has been given to the reactions of Christian churches. North American Churches and the Cold War offers the first systematic reflection on the diverse responses of Canadian and American churches to potential nuclear disaster.

A mix of scholars and church leaders, the contributors analyze the anxieties, dilemmas, and hopes that Christian churches felt as World War II gave way to the nuclear age. As they faced either nuclear annihilation or peaceful reconciliation, Christians were forced to take stands on such issues as war, communism, and their relationship to Christians in Eastern Europe. As we continue to navigate the nuclear era, this book provides insight into Chris-tian responses to future adversities and conflicts.

Two Jews Meet on a Couch Somewhere Between Damascus and Vienna: Debate Follows

Dear readers! How faithfully you have endured a good two weeks and more now without me mentioning psychoanalysis or capitalism! But fear not: this drought now ends. For I have in my hands the recent book of Paul Axton, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytical Reading of Paul (T&T Clark, 2015), 220pp.

Here is the publisher's blurb:

Through the employment of the work of Slavoj Žižek and his engagement with the Apostle Paul, Axton argues that Paul in Romans 6-8 understands sin as a lie grounding the subject outside of Christ, and salvation is an exposure and displacement of this lie. The theological significance of Žižek (along with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan) is his demonstration of the pervasive and systemic nature of this lie and its description as he finds it in Romans 7. The specific overlap of the two disciplines of psychology and theology is found in the psychoanalytic understanding that the human Subject or the psyche is structured in three registers: the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. These three registers function like a lie analogous to the Pauline categories of law, ego, and the 'body of death' which constitute Paul's dynamic of sin's deception.

Axton argues that if sin is understood as a lie grounding the Subject, the exposure of the lie or the dispelling of any notion of mystery connected to sin is integral to salvation and the reconstructing of the Subject in Christ. While the lie of sin is mediated by the law, new life in the Spirit is not through the law but is a principle unto itself, which though it accounts for the law, is beyond the law. 

Of all the books I've read over the past three years in the realm of theology and psychoanalysis, this is one of the most rigorous ones, closest in nature to what Marcus Pound did in his Theology, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma. (Indeed, Axton, explicitly borrows from Pound at several points.)

Your mileage may vary with both books depending on what you think of Lacan, who is the major interlocutor for both authors--along with Zizek, whom both also engage extensively. I have not read a great deal of Lacan, and what I have leaves much to be desired (!). Freud is more grounded, and a far clearer and more disciplined writer than Lacan seems to have been.

Still, Axton offers useful insights into the psychology underlying Paul in Romans, especially in Paul's grappling with the themes of death and self-defeating and often self-destructive behaviors. Axton begins boldly by claiming that "psychoanalysis has taken up what, rightly understood, is within the domain of theology" (17) and illustrates this claim by immediately going on to say that "no theologian has done more than Freud to explain Jesus' counter-intuitive statement, 'For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it' (Mt. 16:25)."

Much of the rest of the book is then an attempt to understand sin as death-dealing, and this puts him into close conversation with Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where, of course, the great analyst put forth his controversial (but, to me, patently obvious) thesis of the death drive. I'm using that book next semester in a course entitled "Sin, Evil, and Hope" where Freud will be put into explicit dialogue along these themes, offering one understanding of sin and evil even while, of course, eschewing such theologically freighted language.

Axton's contention--along with others, including Pound, Rizzuto, and many others discussed on here over the past few years, perhaps especially Adam Phillips--is that Freud could not escape theology, and that he remains enormously useful for Christians and Jews (inter alia) in seeing through many of our neurotic spiritual habits and idolatrous religious practices.

The Ecumenism of Blood

In the latter half of the 1990s I lived in an intentional community, Somerset House, that was deliberately ecumenical. One of my house-mates had grown up Baptist, migrated to the low-church Anglican parish I was then in, and was content to go no further--even as he respected my migration out of Anglicanism and into the Catholic Church. He used to remind me very often that the earthly walls of division do not reach so far as heaven, and I have thought of him often over the years in considering these questions.

More recently, I considered these questions almost exactly a year ago in South Euclid, Ohio, at a conference there, the annual Eastern Churches Seminar (preceded by the absolutely best Armenian food I have ever had). There I gave a lecture "If my saints are true, are yours false?" in which I looked at complicated martyrdoms, especially those coming after the Reformation, and including figures such as Josaphat Kuntsevych and Alexis Toth.

Such questions as mine are freshly taken up in a new book I'm greatly looking forward to reading, authored by the Benedictine scholar Hugh Somerville Knapman in his just-published book, Ecumenism of Blood: Heavenly Hope for Earthly Communion (Paulist Press, 2018), 128pp.

The publisher gives us the following blurb about the book:

Ecumenism of Blood demonstrates that it is possible within the status quo of Catholic doctrine for the Catholic Church to recognize in some official way, in this case liturgically, the Christian martyrs of the eastern churches. Such a development would have immense implications as an example of realizable, practicable ecumenism, as well as a gesture of solidarity with an ancient and persecuted church. Pope Francis's unsystematic references to ecumenism of blood offers an opening, though many in the blogosphere mentioned the ancient denial of the martyr's crown to heretics and schismatics. However, if blood could baptize non-Christians who died in odio Christi, why could it not absolve non-Catholic Christians from schism? Thus, it seemed possible for there to be a reconciliation of blood that could be derived by analogy from baptism of blood. Searching the tradition, it is possible to see this development prepared for, especially from Benedict XIV and reaching a climax with John Paul II's Ut unum sint, the teaching of which is conclusive. Considering ecumenical sensitivity and to avoid the appearance of ecclesial imperialism, Ecumenism of Blood proposes the mechanism of equivalent canonization as a means of realizing what is shown as doctrinally possible. The obvious question serves as an epilogue: would the blood of martyrdom for Christ reconcile any non-Catholic to the Church, even those from communities outside the apostolic succession.

On the Greek Genocide of 1915

In 2015 I gave several lectures on the centenary of the genocidal massacres of Eastern Christians at Ottoman hands. The best-known of these is of course the Armenian Genocide, about which a considerable number of books has emerged over the last quarter-century. But during my lecture I noted that two other captive Eastern Christian populations--Greeks and Assyrians--were also slaughtered in huge numbers. The Assyrian massacres have started very recently to receive some attention, as I noted here. But details about the Greek slaughter have largely been confined to a tiny handful of scholarly articles or passing reference in the occasional book--until now.

Set for November release is The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe by Erik Sjöberg (Berghahn Books, 2018), 266pp.

About this book we are told this by the publisher:

During and after World War I, over one million Ottoman Greeks were expelled from Turkey, a watershed moment in Greek history that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. And while few dispute the expulsion's tragic scope, it remains the subject of fierce controversy, as activists have fought for international recognition of an atrocity they consider comparable to the Armenian genocide. This book provides a much-needed analysis of the Greek genocide as cultural trauma. Neither taking the genocide narrative for granted nor dismissing it outright, Erik Sjöberg instead recounts how it emerged as a meaningful but contested collective memory with both nationalist and cosmopolitan dimensions.

Georgian and Armenian Memories of the Caucasian Schism

Stuck as they are by a behemoth to the north, and by the turmoil of the Middle East to the south of them, the Orthodox Christians of Georgia and Armenia are sometimes overlooked, and their history not well known by outsiders. For those who do know something, they might be able to tell you that the Georgian Church is Eastern Orthodox while the Armenian Church is part of the so-called Non-Chalcedonian family.

But what of their earlier history and unity--and later still schism? A new scholarly study sheds light on these events: Nikoloz Aleksidze, The Narrative of the Caucasian Schism: Memory and Forgetting in Medieval Caucasia (Peeters, 2018), 228pp.


About this book the publisher tells us this:

In the early seventh century, the Georgian and the Armenian Churches separated. Since then, the two nations formed their distinct Christian cultures and national Churches. This also resulted in mutual antagonism, the repercussions of which are still observable in modern Caucasia - This is the prevalent narrative that one encounters in modern histories of medieval Caucasia. In the centre of this narrative lies the Schism - a watershed that divides the history of Caucasia into two chronological constituents, the era before and after. Indeed, the Schism is allegedly one of the most well documented events in Caucasian history, infinitely evoked and referred to in medieval Armenian historical accounts. The present study is an attempt to deconstruct this grand narrative by focusing on the formation of the narrative of the Schism, its central element. It argues that the narrative of the Schism was perpetually reconstructed and reinvented by medieval historians for the purpose of sustaining teleological continuity in their perception of the region's history. In the historical imaginaries of different medieval writers in different times and places, the Schism served as an interpretive tool in attempts to create a sound connection between the present and the forgotten past. The Schism was once again reinvented in contemporary Armenian and Georgia national discourses, and thence has made its way into scholarly studies.

Ukraine and Europe

Perhaps--given the semi-regular appearance of "Ukraine" in Western headlines over the last few years, given the Russian annexation of Crimea and then its war in the Donbas, and given the present struggle for a united and autocephalous Orthodox Church in Ukraine (about which see my interview with Nick Denysenko and his must-read book on the subject)--we might finally expect that Western readers will lose some of their ignorance about the country and acquire some deeper understandings of its history, culture, and future.

One resource to aid that process was recently published. A wide-ranging collection by some important scholars, including one of its editors Serhii Plokhy, is now out in hardback: Ukraine and Europe: Cultural Encounters and Negotiations, eds. G.B. Bercoff, M. Pavllyshyn, and S. Plokhy (University of Toronto Press, 2017)

About this collection we are told:

Ukraine and Europe challenges the popular perception of Ukraine as a country torn between Europe and the east. Twenty-two scholars from Europe, North America, and Australia explore the complexities of Ukraine’s relationship with Europe and its role the continent’s historical and cultural development.

Encompassing literary studies, history, linguistics, and art history, the essays in this volume illuminate the interethnic, interlingual, intercultural, and international relationships that Ukraine has participated in. The volume is divided chronologically into three parts: the early modern era, the 19th and 20th century, and the Soviet/post-Soviet period. Ukraine in Europe offers new and innovative interpretations of historical and cultural moments while establishing a historical perspective for the pro-European sentiments that have arisen in Ukraine following the Euromaidan protests.

War, Memory, and Myth-Making in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus

For many years now the questions of memory and the healing of its traumas have preoccupied me, especially in Catholic-Orthodox relations, but also more generally across cultures. In our forthcoming book on remembering the Ps-Sobor of Lviv of 1946, I briefly discuss some of the challenges posed by competing memories and competing historiographies of the post-World War II world in Ukraine and Russia. A recent and substantial collection carries this discussion further and broadens it out to include a third country: War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, eds. Julie Fedor et al (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), ‎506pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This edited collection contributes to the current vivid multidisciplinary debate on East European memory politics and the post-communist instrumentalization and re-mythologization of World War II memories. The book focuses on the three Slavic countries of post-Soviet Eastern Europe – Russia, Ukraine and Belarus – the epicentre of Soviet war suffering, and the heartland of the Soviet war myth. The collection gives insight into the persistence of the Soviet commemorative culture and the myth of the Great Patriotic War in the post-Soviet space. It also demonstrates that for geopolitical, cultural, and historical reasons the political uses of World War II differ significantly across Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, with important ramifications for future developments in the region and beyond.

Coptic Archaelogy

I find there are many things to admire about the Copts, beginning with their steadfastness over many centuries in the face of changing political fortunes in Egypt under various imperial powers. They are also admirably concerned with the safeguarding of their patrimony, as well as its study and ongoing renewal. Too many Eastern Christians are often not good at telling their history in all its forms. Not so the Copts, as we see in another recent book focusing on Marcus Simaika Pasha: Father of Coptic Archaeology by Samir Simaika (American University of Cairo Press, 2017), 240pp.

About this book we are told:

Marcus Pasha Simaika (1864-1944) was born to a prominent Coptic family on the eve of the inauguration of the Suez Canal and the British occupation of Egypt. From a young age, he developed a passion for Coptic heritage and devoted his life to shedding light on centuries of Christian Egyptian history that had been neglected by ignorance or otherwise belittled and despised.

He was not a professional archaeologist, an excavator, or a specialist scholar of Coptic language and literature. Rather, his achievement lies in his role as a visionary administrator who used his status to pursue relentlessly his dream of founding a Coptic Museum and preserving endangered monuments. During his lengthy career, first as a civil servant, then as a legislator and member of the Coptic community council, he maneuvered endlessly between the patriarch and the church hierarchy, the Coptic community council, the British authorities, and the government to bring them together in his fight to save Coptic heritage.

This fascinating biography draws upon Simaika's unpublished memoirs as well as on other documents and photographs from the Simaika family archive to deepen our understanding of several important themes of modern Egyptian history: the development of Coptic archaeology and heritage studies, Egyptian-British interactions during the colonial and semi-colonial eras, shifting balances in the interaction of clergymen and the lay Coptic community, and the ever-sensitive evolution of relations between Copts and their Muslim countrymen.

Canonical Considerations of the Russian Church-State Relationship

The unwieldy title of this new book is perhaps fitting in some ways insofar as the relationship it treats is, to put it mildly, unwieldy also: Alexander Ponomariov, The Visible Religion: The Russian Orthodox Church and her Relations with State and Society in Post-Soviet Canon Law (1992–2015) (Peter Lang, 2017), 362pp.

The publisher tells us the following about this new book:

«The Visible Religion» is an antithesis to Thomas Luckmann’s concept. The Russian Orthodox Church in post-Soviet canon law suggests a comprehensive cultural program of modernity. Researched through the paradigms of multiple modernities and post-secularity, the ROC appears to be quite modern: she reflects on herself and the secular environment, employs secular language, appeals to public reason, the human rights discourse, and achievements of modern science. The fact that the ROC rejects some liberal Western developments should not be understood in the way that the ROC rejects modernity in general. As a legitimate player in the public sphere, the ROC puts forward her own – Russian Orthodox – model of modernity, which combines transcendence and immanence, theological and social reasoning, an afterlife strategy and cooperation with secular actors, whereby eschatology and the human rights discourse become two sides of the same coin.

Alan Jacobs on Christian Humanism

This interview with Alan Jacobs is worth your time. In it he discusses his newest book, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis (Oxford UP, 2018), 280pp., which sounds fascinating, focusing as it does on several prominent Christian intellectuals of the 1940s--Lewis, Weil, Auden, Eliot, and Maritain.

Oxford tells us this about the book:

By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear that the Allies would win the Second World War. Around the same time, it also became increasingly clear to many Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic that the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. A war won by technological superiority merely laid the groundwork for a post-war society governed by technocrats. These Christian intellectuals-Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others-sought both to articulate a sober and reflective critique of their own culture and to outline a plan for the moral and spiritual regeneration of their countries in the post-war world. 

In this book, Alan Jacobs explores the poems, novels, essays, reviews, and lectures of these five central figures, in which they presented, with great imaginative energy and force, pictures of the very different paths now set before the Western democracies. Working mostly separately and in ignorance of one another's ideas, the five developed a strikingly consistent argument that the only means by which democratic societies could be prepared for their world-wide economic and political dominance was through a renewal of education that was grounded in a Christian understanding of the power and limitations of human beings. The Year of Our Lord 1943 is the first book to weave together the ideas of these five intellectuals and shows why, in a time of unprecedented total war, they all thought it vital to restore Christianity to a leading role in the renewal of the Western democracies.

At different points in the 90s, reflecting changing ecclesial sensibilities as well as ecumenical friendships (that is to say, who my room-mates were), I found myself reading some of the works of all the figures Jacobs features, with early interest in Lewis and Simone Weil, and later in the others, including Maritain (after I had a Catholic room-mate who would sponsor my entry into the Church in 1997).

It was also in this period that I discovered George Grant, a rough contemporary of all the above five though perhaps less explicitly theological and more particularly concerned about Canadian realities. William Christian's biography of Grant was very good--or so I thought at the time, remembering almost none of it now more than two decades later. Grant's essay Technology and Empire was prescient, I thought at the time also.

I read Lewis when I had a hardcore evangelical for a roommate who thought Lewis was just about the only theologian who ever counted. I demurred from that judgment after reading, e.g., the Screwtape Letters and even Mere Christianity. Both are decent, even sometimes droll, works, but I think the Cappadocians and scholastics (inter alia) need not worry about being thrown out of the theological guild by this moderately interesting Ulsterman. I could never get into the Narnia books because I dislike all such books in that genre.

More recently, the Orthodox biblical scholar Edith Humphrey has returned to Lewis in her Further Up and Further In: Orthodox Conversations with C. S. Lewis on Scripture and Theology.

After my evangelical room-mate moved to Japan (where he later became Catholic), and perhaps to re-balance my Anglican sensibilities, I moved over to the Anglo-Catholic Eliot. I'm now slightly embarrassed to recall how many times I have quoted from his essay "Thoughts After Lambeth."

In addition, of course, I read The Wasteland and the Four Quartets in an undergraduate poetry class. I return to both works on a semi-regular basis. His Letters are also fascinating, as this one brief excerpt shows.

All the others on Jacobs' list are men, of course, but Weil is not only the sole woman, but the most unconventional. For me--and for others, I suspect--she is also the most haunting of figures. She raises in an acute way the question of where, and whether, there is any such thing as a limit to God's kenosis--and ours. If Christ descends even unto hell to harrow it, what does it mean to claim that extra ecclesiam there is nulla salus? How far does divine self-denial go, and how far must ours go? And what does it mean to embrace God and salvation? Weil, of course, famously remained outside the Church, but to write her off as some lost cause is a grave mistake it seems to me.

Since I read David McClellan's 1990 biography of her there has been an explosion of interest in Weil, and now biographies proliferate, including one (no surprise) by the ubiquitous Robert Coles (who has also written workman-like biographies of, inter alia, Dorothy Day and Anna Freud.) 

Auden is the one figure I've perhaps read the least of. But just last month, in giving a lecture on why reading Freud is still hugely important, I had occasion to read Auden's poem "In Memory of Sigmund Freud," written only a few months after the great man died in September 1939 in London. How very observant Auden was to say then that

if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,

to us he is no more a person

now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives.

How different our lives have been in this climate of opinion that has not let up in nearly 80 years (as much as it kills Freddie Crewes to admit it)!

Maritain is the only fully paid-up Catholic on the list. I've read bits and pieces of him over the years, including Art and Scholasticism and especially Liturgy and Contemplation. I tried to read the quasi-joint memoirs of his wife, We Have Been Friend Together but never finished it. Among Catholic philosopher friends, I find that reactions range wildly, from some seeing him as a reactionary crank to others thinking him one of the greatest French Catholic intellectuals of the last century and more.

Vigen Guroian on Orthodox Reality

I have been a fan of Vigen Guroian for some time since he most unexpectedly won me over with his two books on gardening, an activity I thought I liked only in theory, never in practice.

I also found his book Life's Living Toward Dying useful in a graduate class I did some years ago now along with some of his other books in ethics.

So, when apprised by the newest Baker Academic catalogue that Guroian has a new book coming out in November, naturally I made a note of it and look forward to reading it.

About this forthcoming work the publisher tells us this:

This is a book about the struggle of Orthodox Christianity to establish a clear identity and mission within modernity--Western modernity in particular. As such, it offers penetrating insight into the heart and soul of Orthodoxy. Yet it also lends unusual, unexpected insight into the struggle of all the churches to engage modernity with conviction and integrity. Written by one of the leading voices of contemporary Orthodox theology, The Orthodox Reality is a treasury of the Orthodox response to the challenges of Western culture in order to answer secularism, act ecumenically, and articulate an ethics of the family that is both faithful to tradition and relevant to our day. The author honestly addresses Orthodoxy's strengths and shortcomings as he introduces readers to Orthodoxy as a living presence in the modern world.

Russian Orthodoxy and Russian Nationalism

Much has been made of resurgent Russian nationalism over the last two decades, outbreaks of which are in part behind the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and certainly the fight over Ukrainian Orthodoxy still ongoing and so well covered by my friend Nick Denysenko's superb book, noted here in my interview with him. I confess to finding all nationalisms absurd on their face but some of the claims advanced by Russia in this regard are especially so, not least in trying, with a straight face, to claim that Moscow is somehow the mother-church of Kyiv, when it was of course the latter Christianized in 988.

For those desirous of deeper insights into these nationalist forces, a recently published book will help: The New Russian Nationalism: Imperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism 2000-2015, eds. Pål Kolstø and Helge Blakkisrud (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 436pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Russian nationalism, previously dominated by ‘imperial’ tendencies – pride in a large, strong and multi-ethnic state able to project its influence abroad – is increasingly focused on ethnic issues. This new ethno-nationalism has come in various guises, like racism and xenophobia, but also in a new intellectual movement of ‘national democracy’ deliberately seeking to emulate conservative West European nationalism.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the subsequent violent conflict in Eastern Ukraine utterly transformed the nationalist discourse in Russia. This book provides an up-to-date survey of Russian nationalism as a political, social and intellectual phenomenon by leading Western and Russian experts in the field of nationalism studies. It includes case studies on migrantophobia; the relationship between nationalism and religion; nationalism in the media; nationalism and national identity in economic policy; nationalism in the strategy of the Putin regime as well as a survey-based study of nationalism in public opinion.