Russian Orthodoxy

Resistance and Submission. Pandemic, Late Modern Epistemes, and Russian Orthodox Ethos

The article discusses the reactions within the Russian Orthodox Church to the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Based on materials from the press, religious and secular Internet‑resources and online forums, the article systematizes the variety of responses of Orthodox priests, laity and church leaders to the unprecedented interruption of liturgical cycle and church sociality in the period of sanitary restrictions.

The Revolution of the Spirits for the Spiritual Brotherhood: Russian Spiritualist Movement and Its Social Ideals

The article offers a reconstruction of the social ideals of Russian spiritualists. Main sources include texts revealing spiritualists’ ideas about the structure of the spiritual world; structure and characteristics of spiritual circles; and literary works by spiritualists reflecting their social ideals. Although the social and political views of Russian spiritualists were mostly conservative, their ontological views contained elements of social radicalism.

Russian Orthodox Women in Unorthodox Times: Patterns of Female Agency and Authority in the Revolutionary Era, 1917–1927

This paper examines various ways in which lay Orthodox women — as mothers, wives, workers, and daughters — navigated the challenges and opportunities they encountered with respect to their faith in the early Soviet period. It centers on two questions: How did women’s faith impact their experience of the Revolution under Bolshevik rule? And how did women’s religious beliefs, behaviors, and faith‑based relationships influence how the Revolution was “lived”?

The Russian Origins of the So-Called Post-Secular Moment: Some Preliminary Observations

European Integration and Russian Orthodoxy: Two Multiple Modernities Perspectives

This article introduces a distinction in the paradigm of multiple modernities between a comparative-civilizational and a post-secular perspective. It argues that the first, comparative-civilizational perspective, helps to understand modernization-processes in large cultural-civilizational units; whereas the second, post-secular viewpoint, focuses on actors and cultural domains within civilizational units and on inter-civilizational crossovers. The two perspectives are complementary.