The Status of the Reinstitution of Deaconesses in the Orthodox Church Today: Consecrated in Africa, Considered Elsewhere
Carrie Frederick Frost Much of my scholarship is on the topic of deaconesses and I am chair of the St. Phoebe Center for the Deaconess, a US nonprofit dedicated to the reinstitution of deaconess in the Orthodox Church, because I perceive these possible changes to be a fulfillment of the Church’s teachings that will help […]
The Dialogue between Christianity and Science in the West and in the East
Juuso Loikkanen In recent decades, the relationship between Christianity and natural science has become a popular area of research in academia. In addition to finding its way into university philosophy and theology departments, several research centres have been established dedicated solely to the study of science and religion. Owing to popular atheist authors, like Richard […]
Studies for whom? Eastern and Western Readership in the Age of Globalization
Serafim Seppälä We scholars publish a lot, but for what purpose? For whom? Who reads our papers and where? This is a question which may need some consideration and elaboration every now and then. In fact, the situation has been rather confounding. A decade or two ago, unbelievable as it may sound, most academic articles […]
Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the West
Talvikki Ahonen For centuries if not millennia, Orthodox Christianity has maintained a complex cultural/political relationship with the “West.” The Great Schism of 1054 divided Christendom and formed the religious and cultural self-understanding of the Orthodox faithful as inherently opposed to the West. The vagueness of the term West has enabled a wide range of (often […]
Perspectives on the Study of Eastern and Western Personhood
Matti Kotiranta & Antti Raunio A commonly held view is that the Western world perceives human beings as being individualistic. ‘Individualism’ may be understood in many ways, but the main question is whether the Western view of human beings is as strongly individualistic as it is often thought (or claimed) to be. This is an […]