In this path-breaking study, Fr. Alexander Webster convincingly demonstrates that a distinctive pacifist trajectory, characterized by the moral virtues of non-violence, nonresistance, voluntary kenotic suffering, and universal forgiveness, has endured through two millennia of Eastern Orthodox history in unbroken continuity with the ancient Church. Webster consults a vast array of primary texts including Holy Scripture, patristic writing through the Byzantine era that terminated in AD 1453, Orthodox canon law from the Seven Ecumenical Councils and other Byzantine Greek legal sources among others. Of interest to historians and to students of theology and religion.

In "Memory Eternal," Sergei Kan combines anthropology and history, anecdote and theory to portray the encounter between the Tlingit Indians and the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska in the late 1700s and to analyze the indigenous Orthodoxy that developed over the next 200 years. As a native speaker of Russian with eighteen years of fieldwork experience among the Tlingit, Kan is uniquely qualified to relate little-known material from the archives of the Russian church in Alaska to Tlingit oral history and his own observations. By weighing the one body of evidence against the other, he has reevaluated this history, arriving at a persuasive new concept of "converged agendas"--the view that the Tlingit and the Russians tended to act in mutually beneficial ways but for entirely different reasons throughout the period of their contact with one another.

The Russian-American Company began operations in southeastern Alaska in the 1790s. Against a description of Tlingit culture at the time of the Russians' arrival, Kan examines Russian Orthodox theology, ritual practice, and missionary methods, and the Tlingit response to them. An uneasy symbiosis characterized the early era of the Russian-American Company, when the trading relationship outweighed any spiritual or social rapprochement.

A second, major focus of Kan's study is the Tlingit experience with American colonial domination. He attributes a sudden revival of Tlingit interest in Orthodoxy in the 1880s as their attempt to maintain independence in the face of concerted efforts by the newcomers (and especially Presbyterian missionaries) to Americanize them.

"Memory Eternal" shows the colonial encounter to be both a power struggle and a dialogue between different systems of meaning. It portrays Native Alaskans not as helpless victims but as historical agents who attempted to adjust to the changing reality of their social world without abandoning fundamental principals of their precolonial sociocultural order or their strong sense of self-respect.

In this path-breaking study, Fr. Alexander Webster convincingly demonstrates that a distinctive pacifist trajectory, characterized by the moral virtues of non-violence, nonresistance, voluntary kenotic suffering, and universal forgiveness, has endured through two millennia of Eastern Orthodox history in unbroken continuity with the ancient Church. Webster consults a vast array of primary texts including Holy Scripture, patristic writing through the Byzantine era that terminated in AD 1453, Orthodox canon law from the Seven Ecumenical Councils and other Byzantine Greek legal sources among others. Of interest to historians and to students of theology and religion.

In a fascinating evaluation of the interdependence of Orthodox iconography and liturgical worship, Quenot guides the reader through the major feasts of the Church through their iconographic representations. Each image is treated not as a distinct work of art but as an integral element of a larger whole. Includes index, glossary, 68 color and 26 b/w illustrations.

The first comprehensive introduction to the Orthodox Church in the United States from 1794 to the present, this book includes a succinct picture of the distinctive history of Orthodoxy and its particular perspectives on the Christian faith. Attention is given to the contacts between the Orthodox Church and other Christian churches, as well as its contributions to the ecumenical movement. Over 80 biographies of major Orthodox leaders in America also are included along with an annotated bibliography of the writings of the major Orthodox theologians. The book begins with a review of the historical characteristics and distinctive faith affirmations of Orthodoxy, which has a history that is quite different from Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Subsequent chapters examine the historical development of the Orthodox Church in this country, with special attention being paid to the early mission in Alaska, the effects of immigration, the organizational developments of parishes and dioceses, the effects of old world politics, the movement toward greater unity, and the distinctive features of American Orthodoxy today. The material is fresh and inclusive, covering all major branches and treating them with an irenic spirit. The biographies are thoughtful and informative, and there is a tremendous amount of bibliographic and reference material. Scholars, practitioners in every faith, and laypersons will find this volume indispensable.

Selected liturgical texts and commentary from the services. A concise opening section outlines the development of this season in the Byzantine rite and its present patterns in the Orthodox Church. Introduces the reader to the richness of Orthodox liturgical prayer and provides Christians of all traditions with material for meditation and personal prayer.

In this book, Bushkovitch traces the evolution of religious attitudes in an important transitional period in Russian history, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Concentrating on the attitudes of the court and elite of Russian society, he explores the effects of the gradual decline of Monastic spirituality, the rise of miracle cults, and the redefinition of Orthodoxy in the seventeenth century. Around 1650, preaching and a moral reformation of the individual believer began to displace the predominant miracle cults and rituals. Centered at first in the court of Tsar Aleksei, these changes began to spread into society at large by the end of the seventeenth century. This redefinition of Orthodoxy created a religion that stressed virtue more than revelation, and thus prepared the ground for the secularization of Russian culture in Peter the Great's time. Using unpublished manuscript material as well as early printed books, Bushkovitch demonstrates that this period was far from the stable (or stagnant) era of Slavophile myth, but a time of continuous and often rapid change. Discussing areas never before researched (such as miracle cults), he not only skillfully reconstructs these rapid and fundamental changes in the Russian religious experience, but also shows how they were influenced by European religious ideas and how they foreshadowed the secularization of Russian society.

In his Old Testament Introduction: The Historical Traditions, Paul Tarazi invites the reader to embark with him on a collective reading of God's Holy Book maintaing that since only God Himself can be the ultimate authority on matters of interpretation, it is the responsibility of each reader to challenge the interpretations of others - including those of Tarazi himself. He argues that only by means of a thorough cross-checking of different understandings can we hope to grasp the intentions of the Old Testament authors.

Inspired by the epistles of St Paul, St John has many things to say to Christian couples and families.

This period of revitalization included the overturning of the Ecclesiastical Regulation of 1721, which had stifled the Church and led to schism between Church and State. The planned National Sobor was convened only to have its work cut off by revolution and civil war.

Word Guild Awards - Academic How can Christians claim that the death of Jesus Christ on the cross is a victory? Yet the doctrine of salvation affirms precisely that: in his death and his resurrection, Christ is victorious over the power of sin and death. The articulation of this tenet of faith has taken different shapes throughout the church's life and history. Eastern Orthodoxy has made its own contributions to the belief in salvation through Christ, but its expressions sometimes sound unfamiliar to Western branches of the church. Here James Payton, a Western Christian with a sympathetic ear for Eastern Orthodoxy, explores the Orthodox doctrine of salvation. Payton helps Christians of all traditions listen to Orthodox brothers and sisters so that together we might rejoice, "Where, O death, is your victory?"

The Xi'an Stele, erected in Tang China's capital in 781, describes in both Syriac and Chinese the existence of Christian communities in northern China. While scholars have so far considered the Stele exclusively in relation to the Chinese cultural and historical context, Todd Godwin here demonstrates that it can only be fully understood by reconstructing the complex connections that existed between the Church of the East, Sasanian aristocratic culture and the Tang Empire (617-907) between the fall of the Sasanian Persian Empire (225-651) and the birth of the Abbasid Caliphate (762-1258). Through close textual re-analysis of the Stele and by drawing on ancient sources in Syriac, Greek, Arabic and Chinese, Godwin demonstrates that Tang China (617-907) was a cosmopolitan milieu where multiple religious traditions, namely Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and Christianity, formed zones of elite culture. Syriac Christianity in fact remained powerful in Persia throughout the period, and Christianity - not Zoroastrianism - was officially regarded by the Tang government as 'The Persian Religion'.Persian Christians at the Chinese Court uncovers the role played by Syriac Christianity in the economic and cultural integration of late Sasanian Iran and China, and is important reading for all scholars of the Church of the East, China and the Middle East in the medieval period.

A complete prayer book in the Slavonic language printed with the Cyrillic (old orthography) alphabet. Includes morning and evening prayers, the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, various Akathists and Canons annd much more besides.

A Silent Patriarch: Kyrillos VI (1902-1971) is the first scholarly biography of the desert hermit who became a most unlikely patriarch. Until now the details of his life have remained hidden. As patriarch, Kyrillos inherited a bleeding church, one confronted by political Islamism, an indifferent Muslim president, and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Silent in the face of persecution, mockery, and criticism, Kyrillos stood at the head of a nearly impossible spiritual revolution. But by the time he reposed, everything had changed. In this lucid biography, Daniel Fanous traces Kyrillos' life from childhood, drawing upon hundreds of letters and sources never before seen, detailing Kyrillos' unusual method of ecclesial reform, which speaks enduringly to the uncertainties of the present age. This is the story of Kyrillos VI, a most unlikely patriarch, and a silent urban recluse.

Even a fleeting glimpse of Mount Fuji's snow-capped peak emerging from the clouds in the distance evokes the reverence it has commanded in Japan from ancient times. Long considered sacred, during the medieval era the mountain evolved from a venue for solitary ascetics into a well-regulated pilgrimage site. With the onset of the Tokugawa period, the nature of devotion to Mount Fuji underwent a dramatic change. Working people from nearby Edo (now Tokyo) began climbing the mountain in increasing numbers and worshipping its deity on their own terms, leading to a widespread network of devotional associations known as Fujik?i. In Faith in Mount Fuji Janine Sawada asserts that the rise of the Fuji movement epitomizes a broad transformation in popular religion that took place in early modern Japan. Drawing on existing practices and values, artisans and merchants generated new forms of religious life outside the confines of the sectarian establishment. Sawada highlights the importance of independent thinking in these grassroots phenomena, making a compelling case that the new Fuji devotees carved out enclaves for subtle opposition to the status quo within the restrictive parameters of the Tokugawa order. The founding members effectively reinterpreted materials such as pilgrimage maps, talismans, and prayer formulae, laying the groundwork for the articulation of a set of remarkable teachings by Jikigy?i Miroku (1671-1733), an oil peddler who became one of the group's leading ascetic practitioners. His writings fostered a vision of Mount Fuji as a compassionate parental deity who mandated a new world of economic justice and fairness in social and gender relations. The book concludes with a thought-provoking assessment of Jikigy?i's suicide on the mountain as an act of commitment to world salvation that drew on established ascetic practice even as it conveyed political dissent. Faith in Mount Fuji is a pioneering work that contains a wealth of in-depth analysis and original interpretation. It will open up new avenues of discussion among students of Japanese religions and intellectual history, and supply rich food for thought to readers interested in global perspectives on issues of religion and society, ritual culture, new religions, and asceticism.

Written by one of the leading scholars of Japanese religion, Rage and Ravage is the third installment of a milestone project in our understanding of the mythico-ritual system of esoteric Buddhism-specifically the nature and roles of deities in the religious world of medieval Japan and beyond. Bernard Faure introduces readers to medieval Japanese religiosity and shows the centrality of the gods in religious discourse and ritual; in doing so he moves away from the usual textual, historical, and sociological approaches that constitute the ""method"" of current religious studies. Throughout, he engages theoretical insights draws from structuralism, post-structuralism, and Actor-Network Theory to retrieve the ""implicit pantheon"" (as opposed to the ""explicit orthodox pantheon"") of esoteric Japanese Buddhism (Mikky?i). In volumes one and two, The Fluid Pantheon and Predators and Protectors, Faure argued against a polarity or dichotomy between buddhas and kami by emphasizing the existence of deities that did not belong to either category, and he rejected the retrospective notion of ""hybridity."" The present work makes a similar case about the reified distinction between gods and demons to show that, due to the fluid nature of the Japanese pantheon, these terms do not represent stable identities: gods can become demons, and demons are sometimes deified. Divine protectors were often former predators, and in some instances they retained their predatory features even after being converted. After emphasizing the demonic aspects of devas as ""gods or spirits of obstacles"" in the earlier volumes, Faure now focuses on the deva-like or ""divine"" aspects of deities that have been described as ""demonic."" Rage and Ravage and its companion volumes persuade readers that the gods constituted a central part of medieval Japanese religion and that the latter cannot be reduced to a simplistic confrontation, parallelism, or complementarity between some monolithic teachings known as ""Buddhism"" and ""Shinto."" Once these reductionist labels and categories are discarded, a new and fascinating religious landscape begins to unfold.

This in-depth study on the realm of death presents a message of hope held by the first generation of Christians and the early church. Using Scripture, patristic tradition, early Christian poetry, and liturgical texts, Archbishop Hilarion explores the mysterious and enigmatic event of Christ's descent into Hades and its consequences for the human race. Insisting that Christ entered Sheol as Conqueror and not as victim, the author depicts the Lord's descent as an event of cosmic significance opening the path to universal salvation. He also reveals Hades as a place of divine presence, a place where the spiritual fate of a person may still change. Reminding readers that self-will remains the only hindrance to life in Christ, he presents the gospel message anew, even in the shadow of death.

"The Teachings of Modern Orthodox Christianity on Law, Politics, and Human Nature" examines how modern Orthodox Christian thinkers have answered the most pressing political, legal, and ethical questions of our time. It discusses the enduring teachings of important Orthodox Christian intellectuals of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leading contemporary scholars analyze these thinkers' views on the nature and purpose of law and authority, the limits of rule and obedience, the care of the needy and innocent, the ethics of war and violence, and the separation of church and state, among other themes. A diverse and powerful portrait of Orthodox Christian legal and political thought, this volume underscores the various ways Orthodox Christian intellectuals have shaped modern debates over the family, the state, religion, and society. The book concentrates on Russian philosophers Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900) and Vladimir Lossky (1903-1958); Russian theologian Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948); Russian nun and social reformer Mother Maria Skobtsova (1891-1945); and Romanian theologian Dumitru St?niloae (1903-1993).

Almost forty years after the publication of Hobsbawm and Ranger's The Invention of Tradition, the subject of invented traditions-cultural and historical practices that claim a continuity with a distant past but which are in fact of relatively recent origin-is still relevant, important, and highly contentious. Invented Traditions in North and South Korea examines the ways in which compressed modernity, Cold War conflict, and ideological opposition has impacted the revival of traditional forms in both Koreas. The volume is divided thematically into sections covering: (1) history, religions, (2) language, (3) music, food, crafts, and finally, (4) space. It includes chapters on pseudo-histories, new religions, linguistic politeness, literary Chinese, p'ansori, heritage, North Korean food, architecture, and the invention of children's pilgrimages in the DPRK. As the first comparative study of invented traditions in North and South Korea, the book takes the reader on a journey through Korea's epic twentieth century, examining the revival of culture in the context of colonialism, decolonization, national division, dictatorship, and modernization. The book investigates what it describes as "monumental" invented traditions formulated to maintain order, loyalty, and national identity during periods of political upheaval as well as cultural revivals less explicitly connected to political power. Invented Traditions in North and South Korea demonstrates that invented traditions can teach us a great deal about the twentieth-century political and cultural trajectories of the two Koreas. With contributions from historians, sociologists, folklorists, scholars of performance, and anthropologists, this volume will prove invaluable to Koreanists, as well as teachers and students of Korean and Asian studies undergraduate courses.

This volume examines a category of Japanese divinities that centered on the concept of "world renewal" (yonaoshi). In the latter half of the Tokugawa period (1603-1867), a number of entities, both natural and supernatural, came to be worshipped as "gods of world renewal". These included disgruntled peasants who demanded their local governments repeal unfair taxation, government bureaucrats who implemented special fiscal measures to help the poor, and a giant subterranean catfish believed to cause earthquakes to punish the hoarding rich. In the modern period, yonaoshi gods took on more explicitly anti-authoritarian characteristics. During a major uprising in Saitama Prefecture in 1884, a yonaoshi god was invoked to deny the legitimacy of the Meiji regime, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the new religion Omoto predicted an apocalyptic end of the world presided over by a messianic yonaoshi god. Using a variety of local documents to analyze the veneration of yonaoshi gods, Takashi Miura looks beyond the traditional modality of research focused on religious professionals, their institutions, and their texts to illuminate the complexity of a lived religion as practiced in communities. He also problematizes the association frequently drawn between the concept of yonaoshi and millenarianism, demonstrating that yonaoshi gods served as divine rectifiers of specific economic injustices and only later, in the modern period and within the context of new religions such as Omoto, were fully millenarian interpretations developed. The scope of world renewal, in other words, changed over time. Agents of World Renewal approaches Japanese religion through the new analytical lens of yonaoshi gods and highlights the necessity of looking beyond the boundary often posited between the early modern and modern periods when researching religious discourses and concepts.

The Armenian Church Synaxarion is a collection of saints' lives according to the day of the year on which each saint is celebrated. Part of the great and varied Armenian liturgical tradition from the turn of the first millennium, the first Armenian Church Synaxarion represented the logical culmination of a long and steady development of what is today called the cult of the saints. This volume, the first Armenian-English edition, is the fifth of a twelve-volume series - one for each month of the year - and is ideal for personal devotional use or as a valuable resource for anyone interested in saints.

The early twenty-first century has seen an explosion of animation. Cartoon characters are everywhere-in cinema, television, and video games and as brand logos. There are new technological objects that seem to have lives of their own-from Facebook algorithms that suggest products for us to buy to robots that respond to human facial expressions. The ubiquity of animation is not a trivial side-effect of the development of digital technologies and the globalization of media markets. Rather, it points to a paradigm shift. In the last century, performance became a key term in academic and popular discourse: The idea that we construct identities through our gestures and speech proved extremely useful for thinking about many aspects of social life. The present volume proposes an anthropological concept of animation as a contrast and complement to performance: The idea that we construct social others by projecting parts of ourselves out into the world might prove useful for thinking about such topics as climate crisis, corporate branding, and social media. Like performance, animation can serve as a platform for comparisons of different cultures and historical eras. Teri Silvio presents an anthropology of animation through a detailed ethnographic account of how characters, objects, and abstract concepts are invested with lives, personalities, and powers-and how people interact with them-in contemporary Taiwan. The practices analyzed include the worship of wooden statues of Buddhist and Daoist deities and the recent craze for cute vinyl versions of these deities, as well as a wildly popular video fantasy series performed by puppets. She reveals that animation is, like performance, a concept that works differently in different contexts, and that animation practices are deeply informed by local traditions of thinking about the relationships between body and soul, spiritual power and the material world. The case of Taiwan, where Chinese traditions merge with Japanese and American popular culture, uncovers alternatives to seeing animation as either an expression of animism or as "playing God." Looking at the contemporary world through the lens of animation will help us rethink relationships between global and local, identity and otherness, human and non-human.

This book is a classic in the history of the Oriental Churches, which are sometimes portrayed as heretical in general church history books, if mentioned at all. Written by a Copt, it portrays the history of the faith of these non-Chalcedonian Churches with first-hand knowledge of their traditions. The author covers Alexandrine Christianity (the Copts and the Ethiopians), the Church of Antioch (Syriac Orthodox), the "Nestorian" Church of the East, the Armenian Church, the St. Thomas Christians of South India, the Maronite Church, as well as the Vanished Churches of Carthage, Pentapolis, and Nubia.

This book examines and compares, from an interdisciplinary perspective of Religious Studies and International Relations, the conduct and rhetoric of the Orthodox Churches of Greece and Cyprus vis-a-vis the process. This study focuses on the conditionality of their "sense of belonging" in the European Union (EU) as their predisposition is dependent, in part, on their sense of "being", as well as on their perception of an ideal type of Europeanness. In this context, this book offers insights on how the Greek and Cypriot Churches, as soft power actors of domestic and European capacity, perceive Europeanness and Otherness; thereby, the compatibility of the personified Greek and Cypriot states with the EU as a post-Westphalian political-cultural entity comes into view.