Arguing that human beings yearn to be rooted in something greater than themselves and to know enduring joy and peace whatever the circumstances, this classic early 20th-century text examines higher consciousness and the divine mysticism of Eastern Christianity. Written by a Russian philosopher and theologian, this book explores the differences between Christian philosophy and other systems and discusses the beliefs of sainted men and women, such as Francis of Assisi, Seraphim of Sarov, and Simeon the New Theologian. Musing upon martyrdom in the epoch of the first two Ecumenical Councils, this book also contains ruminations on the writings of Leo Tolstoy as well as a conversation between him and the author.

"The Church of the Holy Spirit," written by Russian priest and scholar Nicholas Afanasiev (1893-1966), is one of the most important works of twentieth-century Orthodox theology. Afanasiev was a member of the "Paris School" of emigre intellectuals who gathered in Paris after the Russian revolution, where he became a member of the faculty of St. Sergius Orthodox Seminary. "The Church of the Holy Spirit," which offers a rediscovery of the eucharistic and communal nature of the church in the first several centuries, was written over a number of years beginning in the 1940s and continuously revised until its posthumous publication in French in 1971.Vitaly Permiakov's lucid translation and Michael Plekon's careful editing and substantive introduction make this important work available for the first time to an English-speaking audience. "Nicholas Afanasiev is perhaps the most important ecclesiologist of modern times in the Orthodox world. "The Church of the Holy Spirit "is a very important book, a magnum opus, demonstrating that Afanasiev himself is undoubtedly a major twentieth-century theologian." --John McGuckin, Nielsen Professor of Early Ecclesiastical History, Union Theological Seminary "One of the great contributions of the Second Vatican Council was its recovery of a Eucharistic ecclesiology. Yet over a decade before the council, one of the most influential theologians of the Eastern Orthodox communion, Nicholas Afanasiev, was helping his own tradition recover its Eucharistic foundations. The publication of one of his most significant works, " The Church of the Holy Spirit," which the University of Notre Dame Press has now made available in English translation, will allow contemporary readers to discover the provocative, insightful and sometimes idiosyncratic perspectives of this seminal Orthodox theologian." --Richard R. Gaillardetz, Murray/Bacik Professor of Catholic Studies, University of Toledo. "Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev's" The Church of the Holy Spirit" is truly a seminal work of the twentieth-century, an indispensable monument of theological reflection on the Church and her Liturgy. Written over many years, in sustained engagement with the historical experience of the Church and contemporary Eastern and Western theology, the work became itself a catalyst in both eucharistic practice and ecclesiological reflection. This splendid English translation will provide the opportunity for Afanasiev's contribution to be more fully appreciated and critically appropriated." --Rev. Dr. John Behr, Dean, St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary

We experience Orthodox Joy most prayerfully and powerfully during the Divine Liturgy. Focusing on seven virtues, this book offers practical advice for our daily journey by calling us to strive towards living a different virtue every day. After receiving the Eucharist with a deep and abiding joy during Mass, our most joyful union and communion with God, we dedicate each day of the week to these virtues: Monday, Humility; Tuesday, Purity; Wednesday, Holiness; Thursday, Love; Friday, Longsuffering; Saturday, Prayer; and Sunday, our return to Joy: The Joy of Orthodoxy. Deacon David Lochbihler, J.D., celebrated The Joy of Orthodoxy on the day of his Diaconate Ordination during the Feast of Saint Patrick in 2019 at Saint Patrick Orthodox Church in Virginia. He also teaches fourth grade at The Fairfax Christian School in Northern Virginia. After graduating summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame and cum laude from the University of Texas School of Law, Deacon David worked as a Chicago attorney for three years before becoming a teacher and coach for three decades. He earned Master's degrees in Elementary Education, Biblical Studies, and Orthodox Theology. His varsity high school basketball and soccer teams captured four N.V.I.A.C. conference championships. Deacon David authored Prayers to Our Lady East and West in 2021.

An icon (from the Greek word eikon, "image") is a wooden panel painting of a holy person or scene from Orthodox Christianity, the religion of the Byzantine Empire that is practiced today mainly in Greece and Russia. It was believed that these works acted as intermediaries between worshipers and the holy personages they depicted. Their pictorial language is stylized and primarily symbolic, rather than literal and narrative. Indeed, every attitude, pose, and colour depicted in an icon has a precise meaning, and their painters - usually monks - followed prescribed models from iconographic manuals. The goal of this book is to catalogue the vast heritage of images according to iconographic type and subject, from the most ancient at the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai to those from Greece, Constantinople, and Russia. Chapters focus on the role of icons in the Orthodox liturgy and on common iconic subjects, including the fathers and saints of the Eastern Church and the life of Jesus and his followers. As with other volumes in the "Guide to Imagery Series", this book includes a wealth of color illustrations in which details are called out for discussion. This is a new title in the popular Guide "To Imagery series", and includes 400 colour illustrations; and over 380 pages.

St. Elizabeth was a grand daughter of Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Ireland, and the sister of the last Czarina Alexandra. Following the assassination of her husband, the Grand Duke Serge, in 1905, she became a nun. This short work sets forth in the Grand Duchess's own words her vision for monastic life in inner city early twentieth century Moscow. The style is very different from that of better-known monastic rules, as for example of St. Benedict. Through it the reader is offered a glimpse into the daily life of this short-lived but fruitful outreach to the poor of pre-revolutionary Russian society. A short life of the new martyr, murdered by the Bolsheviks, is provided at the end of the work. Well illustrated with black and white photos.

Deification in the Greek patristic tradition was the fulfilment of the destiny for which humanity was created - not merely salvation from sin but entry into the fullness of the divine life of the Trinity. This book, the first on the subject for over sixty years, traces the history of deification from its birth as a second-century metaphor with biblical roots to its maturity as a doctrine central to the spiritual life of the Byzantine Church. Drawing attention to the richness and diversity of the patristic approaches from Irenaeus to Maximus the Confessor, Norman Russell offers a full discussion of the background and context of the doctrine, at the same time highlighting its distinctively Christian character.

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.

Meletij Smotryc'kyj was one of the outstanding figures in the great flourishing of Orthodox spirituality that occurred in the late 16th and early 17th century in response to the challenge posed first by Polish heterodox religious movements, and later by the Polish Counter-Reformation. His biography reflects the tensions and contradictions that characterized his "nation"--the Ruthenians, the Orthodox Christians of the Polish--Lithuanian Commonwealth. Ruthenian patriots were torn between various allegiances to nation, church, and traditions. Thus, in Smotryckyj's life we witness one of the later acts in the drama of the European Age of Reform, all the more important because for the first time the Reformation and Counter-Reformation came into direct daily contact with the Byzantine world of Orthodox Slavdom.

Professor Frick's biography--the first major English--language work on Smotryc'kyj--examines the ways in which established cultures were altered by cross-cultural understandings and misunderstandings, resulting from the confrontation and mutual adaptation of two or more diverse cultures. This study, which has affinities with the "microhistorical approach," seeks to reconstruct details in the lives of individuals and pays special attention to the ways in which individual world views conflicted with each other and with various higher authorities. "Meletij Smotryc'kyj" will be of interest to scholars and students of Ukraine, Belarus, Poland-Lithuania, and those researching the history of the Uniate, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic Churches in Eastern Europe.

The century and a quarter following the Council of Nicaea (AD325) has been called the 'Golden Age of Patristic Literature'. It is this period that Henry Bettenson covers in this companion volume to The Early Christian Fathers, selecting from the writings of Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Jerome, Augustine of Hippo, Cyril of Alexandria, and other Fathers of the Christian Chruch. Their central concerns were to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity after the Nicene conclusions, and to enunciate the doctrine of the divinity ahd humanity of Christ. The writings served to clarify if not to solve the issues and they continue to be value and relevant for all who wish to understand Christian doctrine. As in The Early Christian Fathers, Bettenson translated everything afresh and provided some annotation and brief sketches of the lives of each of the Fathers represented in the selection.

A new English translation of the two apologetic works by the 9th-century East Syrian theologian 'Ammar al-Basri. The Book of the Proof and The Book of Questions and Answers were written to defend Christian beliefs in the face of Muslim criticism.

This book is a critical study of the interaction between Russian Church and society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At a time of rising nationalist movement throughout Europe, Orthodox patriots advocated for the place of the Church as a unifying force, central to the identity and purpose of the burgeoning, yet increasingly religiously diverse Russian Empire. Their views were articulated in a variety of ways. Bishops such as Metropolitan Antony Khrapovitsky - a founding hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia - and other members of the clergy expressed their vision of Russia through official publications (including ecclesiastical journals), sermons, the organization of pilgrimages and the canonization of saints. On the other hand, religious intellectuals (such as the famous philosopher Vladimir Soloviev and the controversial former-Marxist Sergey Bulgakov) promoted what was often a variant vision of the nation through the publication of books and articles. Even the once persecuted Old Believers, emboldened by a religious toleration edict of 1905, sought to claim a role in national leadership. And many - in particularly famous painter Mikhail Vasnetsov - looked to art and architecture as a way of defining the religious ideals of modern Russia. Whilst other studies exist that draw attention to the voices in the Church typified as "liberal" in the years leading up to the Revolution, this work introduces the reader to a wide range of "conservative" opinion that equally strove for spiritual renewal and the spread of the Gospel. Ultimately neither the "conservative" voices presented here nor those of their better-known "liberal" protagonists were able to prevent the calamity that befell Russia with the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Grounded in original research conducted in the newly accessible libraries and archives of post-Soviet Russia, this study is intended to reveal the wider relevance of its topic to an ongoing discussion of the relationship between national or ethnic identities on the one hand and the self-understanding of Orthodox Christianity as a universal and transformative Faith on the other.

Jacob of Sarug's homilies on King Abgar and the Apostle Addai, recounting the famous legend of Abgar of Edessa's conversion to Christianity.

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.

Drawing on multiple archives and primary sources, including secret police files and samizdat, Holy Sobriety in Modern Russia reconstructs the history of a spiritual movement that survived persecution by the Orthodox church and decades of official atheism, and still exists today. Since 1894, tens of thousands of Russians have found hope and faith through the teachings and prayers of the charismatic lay preacher and healer, Brother Ioann Churikov (1861–1933). Inspired by Churikov's deep piety, "miraculous" healing ability, and scripture-based philosophy known as holy sobriety, the "trezvenniki"—or "sober ones"—reclaimed their lives from the effects of alcoholism, unemployment, domestic abuse, and illness. Page Herrlinger examines the lived religious experience and official repression of this primarily working-class community over the span of Russia's tumultuous twentieth century, crossing over—and challenging—the traditional divide between religious and secular studies of Russia and the Soviet Union, and highlighting previously unseen patterns of change and continuity between Russia's tsarist and socialist pasts. This grass-roots faith community makes an ideal case study through which to explore patterns of spiritual searching and religious toleration under both tsarist and Soviet rule, providing a deeper context for today's discussions about the relationship between Russian Orthodoxy and national identity. Holy Sobriety in Modern Russia is a story of resilience, reinvention, and resistance. Herrlinger's analysis seeks to understand these unorthodox believers as active agents exercising their perceived right to live according to their beliefs, both as individuals and as a community.

The only comprehensive critical anthology of theological and historical aspects related to Florovsky's thought by an international group of leading academics and church personalities. It is the only book in English translation of Florovsky's key study in French - "The Body of the Living Christ: An Orthodox Interpretation of the Church". The contributors tackle a broad range of subjects that comprise the theological legacy of one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. The essays examine the life and work of Florovsky, his theology and theological methodology, as well as ecclesiology and ecumenism. A must-have volume for those who study Florovsky and his legacy.

Jacob of Sarug's homily on Aaron the Priest, focusing on the period leading up to and including the death of Aaron described in Numbers 20:22-29.