Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia Culture, History, Context [Paperback]

Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russiailluminates the significant role of Russian Orthodox thought in shaping the discourse of educated society during the imperial and early Soviet periods. Bringing together an array of scholars, this book demonstrates that Orthodox reflections on spiritual, philosophical, and aesthetic issues of the day informed much of Russias intellectual and cultural climate.
??????????? Volume editors Patrick Lally Michelson and Judith Deutsch Kornblatt provide a historical overview of Russian Orthodox thought and a critical essay on the current state of scholarship about religious thought in modern Russia. The contributors explore a wide range of topics, including Orthodox claims to a unique religious Enlightenment, contests over authority within the Russian Church, tensions between faith and reason in academic Orthodoxy, the relationship between sacraments and the self, the religious foundations of philosophical and legal categories, and the effect of Orthodox categories in the formation of Russian literature.

This collection of essays on Russian religious thought focuses on the extent to which Russian culture and ideology has been informed by the nations roots in Orthodox Christianity.

Perhaps no Russian social class has been more colorfully and crudely pigeonholed than the ecclesiasticsfrom the nihilistic seminary student through the village priest, exotic sectarian, and high-ranking but obscurantist religious bureaucrat. This path-breaking volume corrects the picture with fascinating unexpected histories: of a Russian Orthodox Enlightenment, of miracle-verification in a Marxist era, of academic churchmen developing theism out of Kant and legal philosophers insisting on a religious base for human dignity, of Pushkin (and Pasternak) read through a sacred lens and Vladimir Solovev through a liberal one. A treasure-house of solid research and intellectual rigor, in which we see the believing Russialó/