From the moment that Tsars as well as hierarchs realized that having their subjects go to confession could make them better citizens as well as better Christians, the sacrament of penance in the Russian empire became a political tool, a devotional exercise, a means of education, and a literary genre. It defined who was Orthodox, and who was 'other.' First encouraging Russian subjects to participate in confession to improve them and to integrate them into a reforming Church and State, autho...

Traditional, secular, and fundamentalist—all three categories are contested, yet in their contestation they shape our sensibilities and are mutually implicated, the one with the others. This interplay brings to the foreground more than ever the question of what it means to think and live as Tradition. The Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, in particular, have emphasized Tradition not as a dead letter but as a living presence of the Holy Spirit. But how can we discern Tradition ...

In 2018/19, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople initiated the establishment of an autocephalous (independent) Orthodox Church in Ukraine. This process was met with harsh criticism by the Russian Orthodox Church and eventually led to a split in the entire Orthodox world. The contributions to this volume examine this conflict and discuss the underlying causes for it in a broader perspective. They deal with several aspects of Orthodox theology, history, church life and culture, and sho...