Muslim Converts to Greek Orthodoxy

I am greatly looking forward to reading this new study which will begin filling a very considerable gap in the literature on conversion: Proselytes of a New Nation: Muslim Conversions to Orthodox Christianity in Modern Greece by Stefanos Katsikas  (Oxford UP, 2022), 248pp. About this study the publisher tells us this:

Proselytes of a New Nation analyzes questions such as: Why did many Muslims convert to Greek Orthodoxy? What did conversion mean to the converts? What were their economic, social, and professional profiles? And how did conversion affect the converts' relationships with Muslim relatives in Greece and the Ottoman Empire?

Because Sharia law and the Ottoman legal system could keep Muslim apostates--Muslims who had converted to other religions--from inheriting family property, Stefanos Katsikas examines the ways in which conversion complicated family relations and often led to legal disputes. This volume also discusses the method used by the Greek state to adjudicate legal disputes on property issues between neophytes (converts) and their Muslim relatives.

Proselytes of a New Nation maintains that religious conversion in the era of nationalism was far more consequential for the convert, their family, and their social relations. Converts received not only community attention, but also national. Depending upon the religious affiliation and nationality of an individual, they regarded neophytes as either "traitors" or "heroes." Against this sociopolitical backdrop, conversion more drastically affected the social fabric of communities than in the pre-modern era, and more often led to violence and conflict.

The Greek Orthodox Church in America

It's striking to see what apparently is a new imprint from Cornell University Press ("NIU Series in Orthodox Christian Studies"). It will release a volume in this series next June when it publishes The Greek Orthodox Church in America: A Modern History  by Alexander Kitroeff (2020), 324pp.

About this book we are told the following by the publisher:

In this deep history, Alexander Kitroeff shows how the Greek Orthodox Church in America has functioned as much more than a religious institution, becoming the focal point in the lives of the country's million-plus Greek immigrants and their descendants.

Assuming the responsibility of running day- and afternoon Greek-language schools and encouraging local parishes to engage in cultural and social activities, the Church became the most important Greek American institution and shaped the identity of the Greeks in the United States. The Orthodox Church did this by successfully balancing between the need to retain Old World traditions at the core of Orthodox Christianity while adapting to the American environment and to address the spiritual and secular needs of the younger generations steadily integrating into American society.

Kitroeff digs into these traditions, highlighting the American Church's dependency on the "mother church," the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople and the use of the Greek language in the Sunday liturgy. For several decades in the post-WWII era the Church reconciled its Old-World ties with the Americanization of the faithful, most significantly and controversially permitting the use of English in the liturgy. When, at the end of the twentieth century, the process of assimilation progressed to the extent of raising the possibility of the Church merging into a supra-ethnic American Orthodox Church the Patriarchate in Constantinople expressed strong disapproval. But today, as this rich biography of the Church shows us, Greek Orthodoxy remains in between the Old World and the New, both Greek and American.