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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Orthodox Churches
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.
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