Russian Orthodox Church

To Russians, it was a cause for war; to Americans, a category error. Last October, the Orthodox Christian Ecumenical Patriarch…

While many aspects of the Russo-Ukrainian war—such as the annexation of Crimea, the shootdown of passenger airliner MH17, and the…

Winston Churchill famously stated that Russia “is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” While reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s…

Pittsburgh Theological Seminary professor John Burgess’ Holy Rus’: The Rebirth of Orthodoxy in the New Russia is a broad survey…

Dmitry Adamsky’s outstanding Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy explains the religious imagination that has swept not only through the Russian nuclear arsenal since 1991, but also into all levels of the country’s nuclear tirade, military forces, and even Russian foreign policy more broadly.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of Ukraine to Russia: in addition to Greater Russia, there is Holy Rus. Now the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is independent, which has the potential to be a seminal event in the history of both countries.

What on the surface seems simply an esoteric argument over ecclesiastical jurisdiction is anything but. At the heart of the schism lie the ideological underpinnings for Putin’s new nationalism, and its violent manifestations in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

In a Byzantine relationship, a church can be forgiven for choosing not to denounce the government publicly. Henry Sloane Coffin…

In this piece, originally published in Christianity and Crisis on March 22, 1943, N.S. Timasheff notes that the godless policy of the Communist party didn’t indicate an irreligious populace.