Download or read book Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution written by Vera Shevzov and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores sacred community, and how it functioned (or sometimes did not) in Russian Orthodoxy before the fateful historic events of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Download or read book Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent written by John Garrard and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-22 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent is the first book to fully explore the expansive and ill-understood role that Russia's ancient Christian faith has played in the fall of Soviet Communism and in the rise of Russian nationalism today. John and Carol Garrard tell the story of how the Orthodox Church's moral weight helped defeat the 1991 coup against Gorbachev launched by Communist Party hardliners. The Soviet Union disintegrated, leaving Russians searching for a usable past. The Garrards reveal how Patriarch Aleksy II--a former KGB officer and the man behind the church's successful defeat of the coup--is reconstituting a new national idea in the church's own image. In the new Russia, the former KGB who run the country--Vladimir Putin among them--proclaim the cross, not the hammer and sickle. Meanwhile, a majority of Russians now embrace the Orthodox faith with unprecedented fervor. The Garrards trace how Aleksy orchestrated this transformation, positioning his church to inherit power once held by the Communist Party and to become the dominant ethos of the military and government. They show how the revived church under Aleksy prevented mass violence during the post-Soviet turmoil, and how Aleksy astutely linked the church with the army and melded Russian patriotism and faith. Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent argues that the West must come to grips with this complex and contradictory resurgence of the Orthodox faith, because it is the hidden force behind Russia's domestic and foreign policies today.

Download or read book Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent written by John Garrard and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-14 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent is the first book to fully explore the expansive and ill-understood role that Russia's ancient Christian faith has played in the fall of Soviet Communism and in the rise of Russian nationalism today. John and Carol Garrard tell the story of how the Orthodox Church's moral weight helped defeat the 1991 coup against Gorbachev launched by Communist Party hardliners. The Soviet Union disintegrated, leaving Russians searching for a usable past. The Garrards reveal how Patriarch Aleksy II--a former KGB officer and the man behind the church's successful defeat of the coup--is reconstituting a new national idea in the church's own image. In the new Russia, the former KGB who run the country--Vladimir Putin among them--proclaim the cross, not the hammer and sickle. Meanwhile, a majority of Russians now embrace the Orthodox faith with unprecedented fervor. The Garrards trace how Aleksy orchestrated this transformation, positioning his church to inherit power once held by the Communist Party and to become the dominant ethos of the military and government. They show how the revived church under Aleksy prevented mass violence during the post-Soviet turmoil, and how Aleksy astutely linked the church with the army and melded Russian patriotism and faith. Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent argues that the West must come to grips with this complex and contradictory resurgence of the Orthodox faith, because it is the hidden force behind Russia's domestic and foreign policies today.

Download or read book A Spiritual Revolution written by Andrey V. Ivanov and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ideas of the Protestant Reformation, followed by the European Enlightenment, had a profound and long-lasting impact on Russia’s church and society in the eighteenth century. Though the traditional Orthodox Church was often assumed to have been hostile toward outside influence, Andrey V. Ivanov’s study argues that the institution in fact embraced many Western ideas, thereby undergoing what some observers called a religious revolution. Embedded with lively portrayals of historical actors and vivid descriptions of political details, A Spiritual Revolution is the first large-scale effort to fully identify exactly how Western progressive thought influenced the Russian Church. These new ideas played a foundational role in the emergence of the country as a modernizing empire and the rise of the Church hierarchy as a forward-looking agency of institutional and societal change. Ivanov addresses this important debate in the scholarship on European history, firmly placing Orthodoxy within the much wider European and global continuum of religious change.

Download or read book A Long Walk To Church written by Nathaniel Davis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making use of the formerly secret archives of the Soviet government, interviews, and first-hand personal experiences, Nathaniel Davis describes how the Russian Orthodox Church hung on the brink of institutional extinction twice in the past sixty-five years. In 1939, only a few score widely scattered priests were still functioning openly. Ironically, Hitler's invasion and Stalin's reaction to it rescued the church -- and parishes reopened, new clergy and bishops were consecrated, a patriarch was elected, and seminaries and convents were reinstituted. However, after Stalin's death, Khrushchev resumed the onslaught against religion. Davis reveals that the erosion of church strength between 1948 and 1988 was greater than previously known and it was none too soon when the Soviet government changed policy in anticipation of the millennium of Russia's conversion to Christianity. More recently, the collapse of communism has created a mixture of dizzying opportunity and daunting trouble for Russian Orthodoxy. The newly revised and updated edition addresses the tumultuous events of recent years, including schisms in Ukraine, Estonia, and Moldova, and confrontations between church traditionalists, conservatives and reformers. The author also covers battles against Greek-Catholics, Roman Catholics, Protestant evangelists, and pagans in the south and east, the canonization of the last Czar, the church's financial crisis, and hard data on the slowing Russian orthodox recovery and growth. Institutional rebuilding and moral leadership now beckon between promise and possibility.

Download or read book The Heart of Russia written by Scott M. Kenworthy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies in particular monastic revivals in the 19th and 20th centuries, as epitomized by Trinity-Sergius.

Download or read book Deification in Russian Religious Thought written by Ruth Coates and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-09-12 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deification in Russian Religious Thought considers the reception of the Eastern Christian (Orthodox) doctrine of deification by Russian religious thinkers of the immediate pre-revolutionary period. Deification is the metaphor that the Greek patristic tradition came to privilege in its articulation of the Christian concept of salvation: to be saved is to be deified, that is, to share in the divine attribute of immortality. In the Christian narrative of the Orthodox Church 'God became human so that humans might become gods'. Ruth Coates shows that between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 Russian religious thinkers turned to deification in their search for a commensurate response to the apocalyptic dimension of the universally anticipated destruction of the Russian autocracy and the social and religious order that supported it. Focusing on major works by four prominent thinkers of the Russian Religious Renaissance--Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florensky--Coates demonstrates the salience of the deification theme and explores the variety of forms of its expression. She argues that the reception of deification in this period is shaped by the discourse of early Russian cultural modernism, and informed not only by theology, but also by nineteenth-century currents in Russian religious culture and German philosophy, particularly as these are received by the novelist Fedor Dostoevsky and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev. In the works that are analysed, deification is taken out of its original theological context and applied respectively to politics, creativity, economics, and asceticism. At the same time, all the thinkers represented in the book view deification as a project: a practice that should deliver the total transformation and immortalisation of human beings, society, culture, and the material universe, and this is what connects them to deification's theological source.

Download or read book Religion in Rebellions Revolutions and Social Movements written by Warren S. Goldstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-19 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion in Rebellions, Revolutions, and Social Movements demonstrates that, while religion is often a social force that maintains, if not legitimates, the sociopolitical order, it is also a decisive factor in economic, social, and political conflict. The book explores how and under what conditions religion functions as a progressive and/or reactionary force that compels people to challenge or protect social orders. The authors focus on the role that religion has played in peasant, slave, and plebeian rebellions; revolutions, including the Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Iranian; and modern social movements. In addition to these case studies, the book also contains theoretical chapters that explore the relationship religious thought has with the politics of liberation and oppression. It examines the institutional, organizational, ritualistic, discursive, ideological, and/or framing mechanisms that give religion its oppressive and liberating structures. Many scholars of religion continue very conventional modes of thinking, ignoring how religion has been—and continues to be—both a hegemonic and counterhegemonic force in conflict. This book looks at both sides of the equation. This international and interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of politics of religion, sociology of religion, religious studies, gender studies, and history.

Download or read book Orthodox Christian Renewal Movements in Eastern Europe written by Aleksandra Djurić Milovanović and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-11 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the changes underwent by the Orthodox Churches of Eastern and Southeastern Europe as they came into contact with modernity. The movements of religious renewal among Orthodox believers appeared almost simultaneously in different areas of Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth and during the first decades of the twentieth century. This volume examines what could be defined as renewal movement in Eastern Orthodox traditions. Some case studies include the God Worshippers in Serbia, religious fraternities in Bulgaria, the Zoe movement in Greece, the evangelical movement among Romanian Orthodox believers known as Oastea Domnului (The Lord’s Army), the Doukhobors in Russia, and the Maliovantsy in Ukraine. This volume provides a new understanding of processes of change in the spiritual landscape of Orthodox Christianity and various influences such as other non-Orthodox traditions, charismatic leaders, new religious practices and rituals.

Download or read book Rulers and Victims written by Geoffrey Hosking and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many westerners used to call the Soviet Union "Russia." Russians too regarded it as their country, but that did not mean they were entirely happy with it. In the end, in fact, Russia actually destroyed the Soviet Union. How did this happen, and what kind of Russia emerged? In this illuminating book, Geoffrey Hosking explores what the Soviet experience meant for Russians. One of the keys lies in messianism--the idea rooted in Russian Orthodoxy that the Russians were a "chosen people." The communists reshaped this notion into messianic socialism, in which the Soviet order would lead the world in a new direction. Neither vision, however, fit the "community spirit" of the Russian people, and the resulting clash defined the Soviet world. Hosking analyzes how the Soviet state molded Russian identity, beginning with the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war. He discusses the severe dislocations resulting from collectivization and industrialization; the relationship between ethnic Russians and other Soviet peoples; the dramatic effects of World War II on ideas of homeland and patriotism; the separation of "Russian" and "Soviet" culture; leadership and the cult of personality; and the importance of technology in the Soviet world view. At the heart of this penetrating work is the fundamental question of what happens to a people who place their nationhood at the service of empire. There is no surer guide than Geoffrey Hosking to reveal the historical forces forging Russian identity in the post-communist world.

Download or read book Unity in Faith written by James White and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Established in 1800, edinoverie (translated as "unity in faith") was intended to draw back those who had broken with the Russian Orthodox Church over ritual reforms in the 17th century. Called Old Believers, they had been persecuted as heretics. In time, the Russian state began tolerating Old Believers in order to lure them out of hiding and make use of their financial resources as a means of controlling and developing Russia's vast and heterogeneous empire. However, the Russian Empire was also an Orthodox state, and conversion from Orthodoxy constituted a criminal act. So, which was better for ensuring the stability of the Russian Empire: managing heterogeneity through religious toleration, or enforcing homogeneity through missionary campaigns? Edinoverie remained contested and controversial throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, as it was distrusted by both the Orthodox Church and the Old Believers themselves. The state reinforced this ambivalence, using edinoverie as a means by which to monitor Old Believer communities and employing it as a carrot to the stick of prison, exile, and the deprivation of rights. In Unity in Faith?, James White's study of edinoverie offers an unparalleled perspective of the complex triangular relationship between the state, the Orthodox Church, and religious minorities in imperial Russia.

Download or read book Religion Morality and Community in Post Soviet Societies written by Mark D. Steinberg and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This collection reveals the presence and power of religious belief and practice in public life after the demise of Soviet socialism. Based on recent research and interdisciplinary methodologies, Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies examines how religious organizations and individuals engage the changing and troubled environment in which they live, which presents expanded civil freedom but much everyday uncertainty, unhappiness, injustice, and suffering"--Page [4] of cover.

Download or read book Jews and the Imperial State written by Eugene M. Avrutin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, a gradual shift occurred in the ways in which European governments managed their populations. In the Russian Empire, this transformation in governance meant that Jews could no longer remain a people apart. The identification of Jews by passports, vital statistics records, and censuses was tied to the growth and development of government institutions, the creation of elaborate record-keeping procedures, and the universalistic challenge of documenting populations. In Jews and the Imperial State, Eugene M. Avrutin argues that the challenge of knowing who was Jewish and where Jews were, evolved from the everyday administrative concerns of managing territorial movement, ethnic diversity, and the maze of rights, special privileges, and temporary exemptions that composed the imperial legal code. Drawing on a wealth of previously unexplored archival materials, Avrutin tells the story of how one imperial population, the Jews, shaped the world in which they lived by negotiating with what were often perceived to be contradictory and highly restrictive laws and institutions. Although scholars have long interpreted imperial policies toward Jews in essentially negative terms, this groundbreaking book shifts the focus by analyzing what the law made possible. Some Jews responded to the system of government by circumventing legal statutes, others by bribing, converting, or resorting to various forms of manipulations, and still others by appealing to the state with individual grievances and requests.

Download or read book Framing Mary written by Amy Singleton Adams and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the continued fascination with the Virgin Mary in modern and contemporary times, very little of the resulting scholarship on this topic extends to Russia. Russia's Mary, however, who is virtually unknown in the West, has long played a formative role in Russian society and culture. Framing Mary introduces readers to the cultural life of Mary from the seventeenth century to the post-Soviet era. It examines a broad spectrum of engagements among a variety of people—pilgrims and poets, clergy and laity, politicians and political activists—and the woman they knew as the Bogoroditsa. In this collection of well-integrated and illuminating essays, leading scholars of imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia trace Mary's irrepressible pull and inexhaustible promise from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Focusing in particular on the ways in which both visual and narrative images of Mary frame perceptions of Russian and Soviet space and inform discourse about women and motherhood, these essays explore Mary's rich and complex role in Russia's religion, philosophy, history, politics, literature, and art. Framing Mary will appeal to Russian studies scholars, historians, and general readers interested in religion and Russian culture.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Christmas written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-21 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Christmas provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of all aspects of Christmas across the globe, from the specifically religious to the purely cultural. The contributions are drawn from a distinguished group of international experts from across numerous disciplines, including literary scholars, theologians, historians, biblical scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, art historians, and legal experts. The volume provides authoritative treatments of a range of topics, from the origins of Christmas to the present; decorating trees to eating plum pudding; from the Bible to contemporary worship; from carols to cinema; from the Nativity Story to Santa Claus; from Bethlehem to Japan; from Catholics to Baptists; from secularism to consumerism. Christmas is the biggest celebration on the planet. Every year, a significant percentage of the world's population is drawn to this holiday—from Cape Cod to Cape Town, from South America to South Korea, and on and on across the globe. The Christmas season takes up a significant part of the entire year. For many countries, the holiday is a major force in their national economy. Moreover, Christmas is not just a modern holiday, but has been an important feast for most Christians since the fourth century and a dominant event in many cultures and countries for over a millennium. The Oxford Handbook of Christmas provides an invaluable reference point for anyone interested in this global phenomenon.

Download or read book Intimate Empire written by Alexa von Winning and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-29 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "After a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, the Russian Empire struggled to reassert its position as a global power. A small noble family returned from the siege of Sevastopol and joined the rulers' efforts to advance Russian standing in the decades before 1917. Leaving Home tells the story of the Mansurovs, who were known to nineteenth-century observers as resourceful imperial agents and staunch supporters of Orthodoxy. In close interplay with scholarship and the media, they built churches and pilgrim hostels to increase Russian dominance within its borders and in the Ottoman Empire. They facilitated communication between the Russian Empire and the wider Orthodox world and expanded its institutional infrastructure in areas of religion and scholarship outside Russia. Some of the family's achievements stand to this day: the Russian complex in Jerusalem and an impressive Orthodox convent in Riga. When the Revolution came, they faced stigmatization as former nobles, believers, and monarchists. Impoverishment and arrests became part of their daily lives in Soviet Russia. Leaving Home is a study of the momentous role played by elite families in Russia's international involvement in the age of empire. It shows how three generations of a mobile noble family advanced the intertwined causes of the Russian Empire and Orthodoxy, using family resources and tools of intimacy. Women were crucial for the family's efforts, both behind the scenes and in public. Russia, Orthodoxy, and noble family life emerge as part of the European trans-imperial scene." --

Download or read book Across the Revolutionary Divide written by Theodore R. Weeks and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-06-24 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the Revolutionary Divide: Russia and the USSR 1861-1945 offers a broad interpretive account of Russian history from the emancipation of the serfs to the end of World War II. Provides a coherent overview of Russia's development from 1861 through to 1945 Reflects the latest scholarship by taking a thematic approach to Russian history and bridging the ‘revolutionary divide’ of 1917 Covers political, economic, cultural, and everyday life issues during a period of major changes in Russian history Addresses throughout the diversity of national groups, cultures, and religions in the Russian Empire and USSR Shows how the radical policies adopted after 1917 both changed Russia and perpetuated an economic and political rigidity that continues to influence modern society