Russia, Ritual, and Reform

Russia, Ritual, and Reform
Author: Paul Meyendorff
Publisher: RSM Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1991
Genre: Liturgical reform
ISBN: 9780881410907

The reform of the liturgical books conducted in Muscovite Russia in the mid-17th century was an alignment of Russina liturgical usage with contemporary Greek practice. Historians have up to now generally accepted the official interpretation of the reform as a correcting made on the basis of ancient Greek and Slavic sources. In fact, the reform was based exclusively on contemporary sources chiefly the 1602 Venice Euchologion (Greek) and 17th century South-Slavic editions from Kiev and Striatin. Far from being a return to sources, or a correction, the reform consisted simply in the uncritical transposition of contemporary Greek practice onto Russian soil.

Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent

Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent
Author: John Garrard
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2008-09-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780691125732

Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent is the first book to fully explore the expansive and ill-understood role that Russia's ancient Christian faith has played in the fall of Soviet Communism and in the rise of Russian nationalism today. John and Carol Garrard tell the story of how the Orthodox Church's moral weight helped defeat the 1991 coup against Gorbachev launched by Communist Party hardliners. The Soviet Union disintegrated, leaving Russians searching for a usable past. The Garrards reveal how Patriarch Aleksy II--a former KGB officer and the man behind the church's successful defeat of the coup--is reconstituting a new national idea in the church's own image. In the new Russia, the former KGB who run the country--Vladimir Putin among them--proclaim the cross, not the hammer and sickle. Meanwhile, a majority of Russians now embrace the Orthodox faith with unprecedented fervor. The Garrards trace how Aleksy orchestrated this transformation, positioning his church to inherit power once held by the Communist Party and to become the dominant ethos of the military and government. They show how the revived church under Aleksy prevented mass violence during the post-Soviet turmoil, and how Aleksy astutely linked the church with the army and melded Russian patriotism and faith. Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent argues that the West must come to grips with this complex and contradictory resurgence of the Orthodox faith, because it is the hidden force behind Russia's domestic and foreign policies today.

Byzantium and the Rise of Russia

Byzantium and the Rise of Russia
Author: John Meyendorff
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2010-06-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521135337

This book describes the role of Byzantine diplomacy in the emergence of Moscow in the fourteenth century.

Russia in the Early Modern World

Russia in the Early Modern World
Author: Donald Ostrowski
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 575
Release: 2022-01-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1793634211

A fundamental problem in studying early modern Russian history is determining Russia’s historical development in relationship to the rest of the world. The focus throughout this book is on the continuity of Russian policies during the early modern period (1450–1800) and that those policies coincided with those of other successful contemporary Eurasian polities. The continuities occurred in the midst of constant change, but neither one nor the other, continuities or changes alone, can account for Russia’s success. Instead, Russian rulers from Ivan III to Catherine II with their hub advisors managed to sustain a balance between the two. During the early modern period, these Russian rulers invited into the country foreign experts to facilitate the transfer of technology and know-how, mostly from Europe but also from Asia. In this respect, they were willing to look abroad for solutions to domestic problems. Russia looked westward for military weaponry and techniques at the same time it was expanding eastward into the Eurasian heartland. The ruling elite and by extension the entire ruling class worked in cooperation with the ruler to implement policies. The Church played an active role in supporting the government and in seeking to eliminate opposition to the government.

The Power of Kings

The Power of Kings
Author: Paul Kléber Monod
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2001-08-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780300090666

This sweeping book explores the profound shift in the way European kings and queens were regarded by their subjects between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Once viewed as godlike beings, by 1715 monarchs had come to represent the human, visible side of the rational state. The author offers new insights into the relations between kings and their subjects and the interplay between monarchy and religion.

Confessions of the Shtetl

Confessions of the Shtetl
Author: Ellie R. Schainker
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2016-11-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1503600246

Over the course of the nineteenth century, some 84,500 Jews in imperial Russia converted to Christianity. Confessions of the Shtetl explores the day-to-day world of these people, including the social, geographic, religious, and economic links among converts, Christians, and Jews. The book narrates converts' tales of love, desperation, and fear, tracing the uneasy contest between religious choice and collective Jewish identity in tsarist Russia. Rather than viewing the shtetl as the foundation myth for modern Jewish nationhood, this work reveals the shtetl's history of conversions and communal engagement with converts, which ultimately yielded a cultural hybridity that both challenged and fueled visions of Jewish separatism. Drawing on extensive research with conversion files in imperial Russian archives, in addition to the mass press, novels, and memoirs, Ellie R. Schainker offers a sociocultural history of religious toleration and Jewish life that sees baptism not as the fundamental departure from Jewishness or the Jewish community, but as a conversion that marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging. Ultimately, she argues that the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia did not revolve around coercion and ghettoization but was a genuinely religious drama with a diverse, attractive, and aggressive Christianity.

Unity in Faith?

Unity in Faith?
Author: J. M. White
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2020-11-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0253052521

The little known history of an attempt to end a religious schism in imperial Russia, and the questions it raised about church and state. Established in 1800, edinoverie (translated as “unity in faith”) was intended to draw back those who had broken with the Russian Orthodox Church over ritual reforms in the seventeenth century. Called Old Believers, they had been persecuted as heretics. In time, the Russian state began tolerating Old Believers in order to lure them out of hiding and make use of their financial resources as a means of controlling and developing Russia’s vast and heterogeneous empire. However, the Russian Empire was also an Orthodox state, and conversion from Orthodoxy constituted a criminal act. So, which was better for ensuring the stability of the Russian Empire: managing heterogeneity through religious toleration, or enforcing homogeneity through missionary campaigns? Edinoverie remained contested and controversial throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as it was distrusted by both the Orthodox Church and the Old Believers themselves. The state reinforced this ambivalence, using edinoverie as a means by which to monitor Old Believer communities and employing it as a carrot to the stick of prison, exile, and the deprivation of rights. In Unity in Faith?, James White’s study of edinoverie offers an unparalleled perspective of the complex triangular relationship between the state, the Orthodox Church, and religious minorities in imperial Russia.

Solovki

Solovki
Author: Roy R. Robson
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300129602

div Located in the northernmost reaches of Russia, the islands of Solovki are among the most remote in the world. And yet from the Bronze Age through the twentieth century, the islands have attracted an astonishing cast of saints and scoundrels, soldiers and politicians. The site of a beautiful medieval monastery—once home to one of the greatest libraries of eastern Europe—Solovki became in the twentieth century a notorious labor camp. Roy Robson recounts the history of Solovki from its first settlers through the present day, as the history of Russia plays out on this miniature stage. In the 1600s, the piety and prosperity of Solovki turned to religious rebellion, siege, and massacre. Peter the Great then used it as a prison. But Solovki’s glory was renewed in the nineteenth century as it became a major pilgrimage site—only to descend again into horror when the islands became, in the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the “mother of the Gulag” system. From its first intrepid visitors through the blood-soaked twentieth century, Solovki—like Russia itself—has been a site of both glorious achievement and profound misery. /DIV

Liturgical Reform after Vatican II

Liturgical Reform after Vatican II
Author: Nicholas E. Denysenko
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2015-12-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506401449

Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC) was the first document promulgated by the Second Vatican Council. The impact of this document was broad and ecumenical—the liturgical reforms approved by the Council reverberated throughout Christendom, impacting the order and experience of worship in Reformed and Orthodox Churches. Unrecognized in most studies, the Orthodox Churches were also active participants in the liturgical movement that gained momentum through the Catholic and Protestant Churches in the twentieth century. This study examines Orthodox liturgical reform after Vatican II through the lens of Catholic-Orthodox ecumenical dialogue. After establishing the retrieval of the priesthood of the laity and active liturgical participation as the rationales for liturgical reform, the study presents the history of liturgical reform through four models: the liturgical reforms of Alexander Schmemann; the alternative liturgical center in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR); the symposia on liturgical rebirth authorized by the Church of Greece; and the renewed liturgy of New Skete Monastery. Following a discussion of the main features of liturgical reform, catechesis, ars celebrandi, and the role of the clergy, Denysenko concludes with suggestions for implementing liturgical reform in the challenges of postmodernity and in fidelity to the contributions of Catholic-Orthodox ecumenical dialogue.