Christos Yannaras is one of the most significant Orthodox theologians of recent times. The work of Yannaras is virtually synonymous with a turn or renaissance of Orthodox philosophy and theology, initially within Greece, but as the present volume confirms, well beyond it. His work engages not only with issues of philosophy and theology, but also takes in wider questions of culture and politics. With contributions from established and new scholars, the book is divided into three sections, which correspond to the main directions that Christos Yannaras has followed - philosophy, theology, and culture - and reflects on the ways in which Yannaras has engaged and influenced thought across these fields, in addition to themes including ecclesiology, tradition, identity, and ethics. This volume facilitates the dialogue between the thought of Yannaras, which is expressed locally yet is relevant globally, and Western Christian thinkers. It will be of great interest to scholars of Orthodox and Eastern Christian theology and philosophy, as well as theology more widely.

Despite over 200 million adherents, Eastern Orthodox Christianity attracts little scholarly attention. While more-covered religions emerge as powerful transnational forces, Eastern Orthodoxy appears doggedly local, linked to the ethnicity and land of the now marginalized Eastern Europe. But Eastern Orthodoxy in a Global Age brings together new and nuanced understandings of the Orthodox churches--inside and outside of Eastern Europe--as they negotiate an increasingly networked world. The picture that emerges is less of a people stubbornly refusing modernization, more of a people seeking to maintain a stable Orthodox identity in an unstable world. For anyone interested in the role of Eastern Orthodoxy in the 21st century, this volume provides the place to begin.

In A Philosophy of the Unsayable, William Franke argues that the encounter with what exceeds speech has become the crucial philosophical issue of our time. He proposes an original philosophy pivoting on analysis of the limits of language. The book also offers readings of literary texts as poetically performing the philosophical principles it expounds. Franke engages with philosophical theologies and philosophies of religion in the debate over negative theology and shows how apophaticism infiltrates the thinking even of those who attempt to deny or delimit it. In six cohesive essays, Franke explores fundamental aspects of unsayability. In the first and third essays, his philosophical argument is carried through with acute attention to modes of unsayability that are revealed best by literary works, particularly by negativities of poetic language in the oeuvres of Paul Celan and Edmond Jabes. Franke engages in critical discussion of apophatic currents of philosophy both ancient and modern, focusing on Hegel and French post-Hegelianism in his second essay and on Neoplatonism in his fourth essay. He treats Neoplatonic apophatics especially as found in Damascius and as illuminated by postmodern thought, particularly Jean-Luc Nancy's deconstruction of Christianity. In the last two essays, Franke treats the tension between two contemporary approaches to philosophy of religion-Radical Orthodoxy and radically secular or Death-of-God theologies. A Philosophy of the Unsayable will interest scholars and students of philosophy, literature, religion, and the humanities. This book develops Franke's explicit theory of unsayability, which is informed by his long-standing engagement with major representatives of apophatic thought in the Western tradition.

A Psalter for Prayer is the first major English edition to include all the prayers needed to read the Psalter at home. In addition, the contents include many texts not easily found in English, such as the Rite for Singing the Twelve Psalms, directions for reading the Psalter for the Departed and much more. The Psalms and Nine Biblical Canticles have been adapted from the classic Miles Coverdale translation of the Book of Psalms and the King James Version of the Bible. The text has been carefully edited to agree with the original Greek of the Septuagint, as well as to the Latin and Church Slavonic translations.

The Cult of St Anna in Byzantium is the first undertaking in Byzantine research to study the phenomenon of St Anna's cult from the sixth to the fifteenth centuries. It was prompted by the need to enrich our knowledge of a female saint who had already been studied in the West but remained virtually unknown in Eastern Christendom. It focuses on a figure little-studied in scholarship and examines the formation, establishment and promotion of an apocryphal saint who made her way to the pantheon of Orthodox saints. Visual and material culture, relics and texts track the gradual social and ideological transformation of Byzantium from early Christianity until the fifteenth century. This book not only examines various aspects of early Christian and Byzantine civilisation, but also investigates how the cult of saints greatly influenced cultural changes in order to suit theological, social and political demands. The cult of St Anna influenced many diverse elements of Christian life in Constantinople, including the creation of sacred spaces and the location of haghiasmata (fountains of holy water) in the city; imperial patronage; the social reception of St Anna's story; and relic narratives. This monograph breaks new ground in explaining how and why Byzantium and the Orthodox Church attributed scriptural authority to a minor figure known only from a non-canonical work.

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 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.

Despite over 200 million adherents, Eastern Orthodox Christianity attracts little scholarly attention. While more-covered religions emerge as powerful transnational forces, Eastern Orthodoxy appears doggedly local, linked to the ethnicity and land of the now marginalized Eastern Europe. But Eastern Orthodoxy in a Global Age brings together new and nuanced understandings of the Orthodox churches--inside and outside of Eastern Europe--as they negotiate an increasingly networked world. The picture that emerges is less of a people stubbornly refusing modernization, more of a people seeking to maintain a stable Orthodox identity in an unstable world. For anyone interested in the role of Eastern Orthodoxy in the 21st century, this volume provides the place to begin.

The Russian church is central to an understanding of early Russian and Slav history, but for many years there has been no accessible, up-to-date introduction to the subject in English - until now. The late John Fennell's last book, is a masterly survey of the development, nature and role of the early Church in Russia from Christianization of the country in 988, through Kievan and Tatar poeriods to 1448 when the Russian Church finally became totally independent of its mother-church in Byzantium.

Following the end of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church has canonized a great number of Russian saints. Whereas in the first millennium of Russian Christianity (988-1988) the Church recognized merely 300 Russian saints, the number had grown to more than 2,000 by 2006. This book explores the remarkable phenomenon of new Russian martyrdom. It outlines the process of canonization, examines how saints are venerated, and relates all this to the ways in which the Russian state and its people have chosen to remember the Soviet Union and commemorate the victims of its purges. The book includes in-depth case studies of particular saints and examines the diverse ways in which they are venerated.

Radical Orthodoxy remains an important movement within Christian theology, but does it relate effectively with an increasingly pluralist and secular Western society? Can it authentically communicate the beauty and desire of the divine to such a diverse collection of theological accounts of meaning? This book re-assesses the viability of the social model given by John Milbank, before attempting an out-narration of this vision with a more convincing account of the link between the example of the Trinitarian divine and the created world. It also touches on areas such as interreligious dialogue, particularly between Christianity and Islam, as well as social issues such as marginalisation, integration, and community relations in order to chart a practical way forward for the living of a Christian life within contemporary plurality. This is a vital resource for any Theology academic with an interest in Radical Orthodoxy and conservative post-modern Christian theology. It will also appeal to scholars involved in Islamic Studies and studying interreligious dialogues.

This book explores the political relationship between the Muslim majority and Coptic minority in Egypt between 1918 and 1952. Many Egyptians hoped to see the collaboration of the 1919 revolution spur the creation of both a new collective Egyptian identity and a state without religious bias. Traditional ways of governing, however, were not so easily cast aside. Some Egyptians held tenaciously to the traditional arrangements which had both guaranteed Muslim primacy and served relatively well to protect the Copts and afford them some autonomy. Differences within the Coptic community over the wisdom of trusting the genuineness and durability of Muslim support for equality were accentuated by a protracted struggle between reforming laymen and conservative clergy for control of the community. The unwillingness of all parties to compromise hampered the ability of the community both to determine and to defend its interests. The Copts met with modest success in their attempt to become full Egyptian citizens. Their influence in the Wafd, the pre-eminent political party, was very strong prior to and in the early years of the constitutional monarchy, and their formal representation was generally adequate and, in some parliaments, better than adequate. However, this very success produced a backlash which caused many Copts to believe, by the 1940s, that the experiment had failed: political activity has become fraught with risk for them. At the close of the monarchy, equality and shared power seemed motions as distant as in the disheartening years before the 1919 revolution.

The Anastenaria are Orthodox Christians in Northern Greece who observe a unique annual ritual cycle focused on two festivals, dedicated to Saint Constantine and Saint Helen. The festivals involve processions, music, dancing, animal sacrifices, and culminate in an electrifying fire-walking ritual. Carrying the sacred icons of the saints, participants dance over hot coals as the saint moves them. 'The Burning Saints' presents an analysis of these rituals and the psychology behind them. Based on long-term fieldwork, 'The Burning Saints' traces the historical development and sociocultural context of the Greek fire-walking rituals. As a cognitive ethnography, the book aims to identify the social, psychological and neurobiological factors which may be involved and to explore the role of emotional and physiological arousal in the performance of such ritual. A study of participation, experience and meaning, 'The Burning Saints' presents a highly original analysis of how mental processes can shape social and religious behaviour.

Orthodox Christians, as well as other non-Muslims of the Ottoman Empire, have long been treated as insular and homogenous entities, distinctly different and separate from the rest of the Ottoman world. Despite this view prevailing in mainstream historiography, some scholars have suggested recently that non-Muslim life was not as monolithic and rigid as is often supposed. In an endeavour to understand the ties among Christians within the administrative, social and economic structures of the imperial and Orthodox Christian worlds, Ayse Ozil engages in a rarely undertaken comparative analysis of Ottoman, Greek and European archival sources. Using the hitherto under-explored region of Hudavendigar in the heartland of the empire as a case study, she questions commonplace assumptions about the meaning of ethno-religious community within a Middle Eastern imperial framework. Offering a more nuanced investigation of Ottoman Christians by connecting Ottoman and Greek history, which are often treated in isolation from one another, this work sheds new light on communal existence.

This book argues for the inseparability of classical Hellenism from the Greek patristic tradition from a distinctly Eastern Orthodox perspective. Postulating a common striving for truth in both domains, it places emphasis on the contributions of the ancients and Greek paideia to Christian learning and culture. In the spirit of the late Werner Jaeger, the essays contained in the volume provide a fruitful strategy for looking anew at the Greek classical world and Christianity through the eyes of the Greek Fathers, the direct inheritors of the ancient Greek worldview. Collectively, the author and contributors excellently demonstrate that, conflated with the visionary insights of the Jewish prophets and of Jewish messianism, the wisdom of the ancients served to pave the way for the unfolding of the fullness of Christian teaching and its spiritually enlightening revelation.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

John Chryssavgis explores the sacred dimension of the natural environment, and the significance of creation in the rich theological history and spiritual classics of the Orthodox Church, through the lens of its unique ascetical, liturgical and mystical experience. The global ecological crisis affecting humanity's air, water, and land, as well as the planet's flora and fauna, has resulted in manifest fissures on the image of God in creation. Chryssavgis examines, from an Orthodox Christian perspective, the possibility of restoring that shattered image through the sacramental lenses of cosmic transfiguration, cosmic interconnection, and cosmic reconciliation. The viewpoints of early theologians and contemporary thinkers are extensively explored from a theological and spiritual perspective, including countering those who deny that God's creation is in crisis. Presenting a worldview advanced and championed by the Orthodox Church in the modern world, this book encourages personal and societal transformation in making ethical and economic choices that respect creation as sacrament.

First published in 2005. Originally, the Ethiopian Church received fourteen Anaphora's from the Church of Egypt, yet at the time of publication, only three of them could be accounted for- that of St. Cyril, St. Gregory and St. Basil. Marcos Daoud has therefore devoted this work to the English translation of the remaining three.

In many ways, we seem to be living in wintry times at present in the Western world. In this new book, Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury and a noted scholar of Eastern Christianity, introduces us to some aspects and personalities of the Orthodox Christian world, from the desert contemplatives of the fourth century to philosophers, novelists and activists of the modern era, that suggest where we might look for fresh light and warmth. He shows how this rich and diverse world opens up new ways of thinking about spirit and body, prayer and action, worship and social transformation, which go beyond the polarisations we take for granted. Taking in the world of the great spiritual anthology, the Philokalia, and the explorations of Russian thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, discussing the witness of figures like Maria Skobtsova, murdered in a German concentration camp for her defence of Jewish refugees, and the challenging theologies of modern Greek thinkers like John Zizioulas and Christos Yannaras, Rowan Williams opens the door to a 'climate and landscape of our humanity that can indeed be warmed and transfigured'. This is an original and illuminating vision of a Christian world still none too familiar to Western believers and even to students of theology, showing how the deep-rooted themes of Eastern Christian thought can prompt new perspectives on our contemporary crises of imagination and hope.

The central task of "Being With God" is an analysis of the relation between apophaticism, trinitarian theology, and divine-human communion through a critical comparison of the trinitarian theologies of the Eastern Orthodox theologians Vladimir Lossky (1903-58) and John Zizioulas (1931-), arguably two of the most influential Orthodox theologians of the past century. These two theologians identify as the heart and center of all theological discourse the realism of divine-human communion, which is often understood in terms of the familiar Orthodox concept of theosis, or divinization. The Incarnation, according to Lossky and Zizioulas, is the event of a real divine-human communion that is made accessible to all; God has become human so that all may participate fully in the divine life. Aristotle Papanikolaou shows how an ontology of divine-human communion is at the center of both Lossky's and Zizioulas's theological projects. He also shows how, for both theologians, this core belief is used as a self-identifying marker against "Western" theologies, which both see as excessively rationalistic. Papanikolaou maintains, however, that Lossky and Zizioulas hold profoundly different views on how to conceptualize God as the Trinity. Their key difference is over the use of apophaticism in theology in general and especially the relation of apophaticism to the doctrine of the Trinity. For Lossky, apophaticism is the central precondition for a trinitarian theology; for Zizioulas, apophaticism has a much more restricted role in theological discourse, and the God experienced in the eucharist is not the God beyond being but the immanent life of the trinitarian God. Papanikolaou provides readers with a richer understanding of contemporary Orthodox theology through his analysis of the consensus and debate between two leading Orthodox theologians.

Although its various bodies boast a combined total of at least 300 million members, the Eastern Orthodox Church is widely perceived among members of other denominations to be an exotic branch of the faith, often shrouded in mysticism and misunderstanding that has been exacerbated by the longstanding Eastern-Western split. In 'Purification of Memory', Ambrose Mong casts light on the true nature of Orthodox theology, illuminating the thinking of eight distinguished modern Orthodox theologians who have made important contributions on topics as ecclesiology, ecumenism, Christology, and Mariology. Approaching the work of John Meyendorff, Nicholas Afanasiev, John Zizioulas, Georges Florovsky, Sergius Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky, Nicolas Berdyaev, and Jaroslav Pelikan from an ecumenical standpoint, Mong deftly draws comparisons with the theology of their Roman Catholic counterparts to reveal points on which the two traditions have much more in common than either side will always admit. The author interweaves these comparisons with a fascinating exposition of the history of the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches to demonstrate decisively that in spite of the bitter mistrust dividing them, they share a common heritage which could, and should, serve as a basis for reunification. Before old wounds can mend, however, a healing process of forgetting, characterized by Pope John Paul II as a 'purification of memory', must take place to clear the path towards a long-awaited return to unity.

In the post-Soviet period morality became a debatable concept, open to a multitude of expressions and performances. From Russian Orthodoxy to Islam, from shamanism to Protestantism, religions of various kinds provided some of the first possible alternative moral discourses and practices after the end of the Soviet system. This influence remains strong today. Within the Russian context, religion and morality intersect in such social domains as the relief of social suffering, the interpretation of history, the construction and reconstruction of traditions, individual and social health, and business practices. The influence of religion is also apparent in the way in which the Russian Orthodox Church increasingly acts as the moral voice of the government. The wide-ranging topics in this ethnographically based volume show the broad religious influence on both discursive and everyday moralities. The contributors reveal that although religion is a significant aspect of the various assemblages of morality, much like in other parts of the world, religion in postsocialist Russia cannot be separated from the political or economic or transnational institutional aspects of morality.

Popular Patristics Series Volume 50 Saint Basil of Caesarea (c. 329-378/9 CE) was a monk, bishop, preacher, theologian, and social activist who had very down-to-earth views about eating, drinking, fasting, and feasts in honor of local martyrs. In this new collection of sermon translations-most offered here in English for the first time-Basil addresses such issues as drunkenness, hesitations over baptism, community benefits of fasting, how to be thankful when facing loss and disaster, and the mystery of the incarnation. Also included are three sermons on local martyrs Julitta, Mamas, and Barlaam. This small volume of elegant translations will be a vital and valued resource for anyone interested in religion and the body, early Christian spiritual disciplines, and their application to the Church today.

The Eucharistic Prayer is the most central and distinctive form of Christian public prayer apart from the Lord's Prayer itself. It gradually evolved into fixed forms during the early Christian centuries, and the Eucharistic Prayer of Addai and Mari is almost certainly the oldest such prayer still in regular use. Dr Gelston's study presents a critical edition of the medieval Syriac text of this ancient Eucharistic Prayer. The text, which is eclectic, is accompanied by a select critical apparatus and a translation, and is followed by textual notes on the variants in the apparatus. The detailed commentary, accessible to those who do not read Syriac, is concerned chiefly with literary-critical and historical questions such as the parallels with the Maronite anaphora Sharar which provide a particular opportunity to detect possible later accretions and modifications. A tentative reconstruction of the Prayer as it may have been at about the beginning of the fifth century is offered in an appendix, and an introduction sets the Prayer in its wider context.