Böcker utgivna av Academica

Orthodox Christianity is one of the world's major religions, and the Russian Orthodox Church is by far its largest denomination. Few know its history and spiritual richness, however. Neil Kent's comprehensive new book fills that gap. The Russian Orthodox Church's Eastern roots, including its dogma, canons, and practices, are explored, along with the political and military contexts in which it carried out its mission over the centuries. Hemmed in between the Catholic powers of pre-Reformation Europe in the West, the Mongol steppe empires to the East, and the Islamic civilizations to the South, Russia and its Church found themselves in a difficult position during the Middle Ages. The Russian Orthodox Church's greatest strength was in the spiritual power of its liturgy, prayerfulness, icons, and monastic life. But even as the Church consolidated its authority under its own metropolitan, and later patriarch, it came into conflict with political rulers who sought to undermine it. After defeating foreign challenges, the Church underwent a painful reformation and schism, finally coming under government control. The Church survived this "Babylonian Captivity," and, in philosophical and spiritual terms, flourished under tsarist rule while still facing rising opposition. The fall of the monarchy in 1917 led to the Church's brief rejuvenation, but communist rule spelled relentless persecution with little respite at home and a lively émigré church carrying Russian traditions abroad. In post-Soviet times, however, the Church enjoyed an extraordinary resurrection and, benefiting from the spiritual richness and reunion with the Russian Orthodox Church abroad, once again became a spiritual pillar of the Russian people and a beacon of hope and Christian values, not only in Russia but anywhere it is currently practiced.

This set of letters, written daily last year to his grandchildren by Reinhold Knoll, emeritus professor of sociology in Vienna, began as an attempt to maintain his relationships with them during the enforced separation of the pandemic of 2021. But as the themes accumulated they evolved into something of an obituary of European culture, politics, and society, as well as an admonition and a gesture of thanks to the United States, itself unbloodied by the religious wars, having taken a revolutionary path different from that of Paris, and above all having saved Europe from the World Wars of the twentieth century.There are one hundred eleven letters, in homage to the "pragmatic idealism" of Beethoven: like the corpus of his piano sonatas, some are light and humorous while others plumb the depths, but each reaches its own unique unity by bringing the past into the present or deriving the present from the past, often enhanced by the irony, humor, and independence of the Viennese perspective, with recondite and penetrating observations on enlightenment and revolution, painting and architecture and music, the history of social thought, the devolution of the museum, the status of the church, the migration crisis, fashions in pedagogy, and the insidious reversal by which technology is reducing its human users into tools for its own aimless profit. It is the work of a balanced consciousness in troubled times.