Review of Caryl Emerson, George Pattison and Randall A. Poole (eds.): The Oxford handbook of Russian religious thought .
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Review of Caryl Emerson, George Pattison and Randall A. Poole (eds.): The Oxford handbook of Russian religious thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Xxviii + 712 pages. Hardcover: ISBN 978‑0‑19‑879644‑2, £110.00 Kåre Johan Mjør1 Accepted: 12 November 2020 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. part of Springer Nature 2020
Introduction The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought is a collective volume consisting of forty chapters, an introduction by the editors, and a foreword by Hilarion Alfeyev, a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church. It covers periods, currents, themes, and individual thinkers from the baptism of Rus’ and well into the Perestroika period, with an emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The editors avoid entering into the post-Soviet and contemporary scene, arguing that an “exact stopping-point” would be impossible to identify (p. xxvi). A handbook on Russian religious thought is timely and relevant. Research on this subject in recent times has been extensive and ground-breaking, thanks to many of the contributing authors. A key task for a handbook is to present a state-of-the-art survey of the field at hand, but this one provides plenty of new research as well. Paul Valliere’s chapter on “The Influence of Russian Religious Thought on Western Theology in the Twentieth Century” is an obvious case in point. Here, as in his other recent works, Valliere addresses the global contexts of Russian religious thought: contexts in which it has been situated and those that have been shaped by it. In general, both the quality of individual chapters and the broad scope of the volume as a whole are impressive. This short review cannot do justice to the rich and varied content of the handbook and must be limited to a few selected topics, referring, regrettably perhaps, mainly to canonized figures. Western audiences have for a long time been fascinated with Russian religious thought as it appears in the work of the thinkers and in the ideas informed by the Orthodox context, above all, philosophers from the Slavophiles to the first-wave émigrés. As the editors point out in their introduction, this fascination may have replaced earlier Russophobia with a more recent Russophilia, neither * Kåre Johan Mjør [email protected] 1
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of which, however, has been free from orientalizing tendencies. Be that as it may, the volume does a good job in de-orientalizing Russian thought, since the latter’s constitutive entanglement with Western thought is a recurrent theme. Russian religious thought has now for centuries been in an active engagement with secularizing modernity, rather than merely a reaction to it. This has prompted questions, for instance, about the church: What is it? Where is it? And how could it be relevant? This topic is dealt with in several chapters. One of the major achievements of this book is that it demonstrates the great variety
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