Now with a foreword by Matthew Lee Anderson Antiquated. Unimaginative. Repressive. We've all heard these common reactions to orthodox Christian beliefs. Even Christians themselves are guilty of the tendency to discard historic Christianity. Yet as we read through the literature in Christianity’s past, we learn that we are in better company with our beliefs than we might think. Through his enchanting book, Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton reminds us of the paradoxes of our faith and the joy that comes when we explore them. From the foreword by Matthew Lee Anderson, author of The End of Our Exploring: “How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?” And with that question, G.K. Chesterton recounts the heart of an intellectual journey that took him from the edges of a nihilistic pessimism into the center of the paradoxical joy of Christian orthodoxy. His book is not a defense of the Christian faith, at least not primarily, so much as an attempt to explain how the startling paradoxes and sharp edges of the creed explain everything else. It is a dated work, dealing in the categories and concerns of Chesterton’s contemporaries, and yet it comes nearer timelessness than anything we have today. Though Orthodoxy was written near the start of the 20th century, I have dubbed it the most important book for the 21st. There are few claims I have made in my life that I am more sure of than that one.

This volume of essays honours Henry Chadwick, probably the greatest and best-known of English scholars of early Christianity. The essays, written by many of the leading theologians and church historians in the English-speaking world, discuss different aspects of how Christianity developed norms and standards in its teaching, how it came to have - and to enforce - a definition of orthodoxy and heresy. It is a collection of fundamental work by internationally recognised experts. It covers issues of orthodoxy from the first right up to the sixth century, and its wide-ranging surveys of centrally important material in early Christianity will find broad appeal among scholars and students of Old and New Testaments, medieval history and patristics.

The Problem of Orthodoxy: Evangelicals at the Crossroads of Truth and Power reexamines Christian orthodoxy, especially contemporary evangelicalism in the United States, from the standpoint of structure instead of content. Rather than focus on which Christian doctrines are “correct”, Michael Blanco explores how orthodoxy functions to invite, cajole, warn, demonize, and perpetrate violence against those who are within and without its circle. The author is particularly interested in the nexus of power and orthodoxy, including violence, and many of his examples also touch on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). To the degree that orthodoxy acts to coerce viewpoints and actions, especially over doctrinal and moral peccadilloes, this fact constitutes “the problem of orthodoxy.”

In Russian Orthodoxy and Secularism, Kristina Stoeckl surveys the ways in which the Russian Orthodox Church has negotiated its relationship with the secular state, with other religions, and with Western modernity from its beginnings until the present.

Sixteen scholars from around the globe gathered at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the bucolic Yarnton Manor in the Oxfordshire countryside in June 2014, for the first (now annual) Oxford Summer Institute on Modern and Contemporary Judaism. The current volume is the fruit of this encounter. The goal of the event was to facilitate in-depth engagement with the thought of Rabbi Dr. Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, concentrating particularly on the historical ramifications of his theological and public stances. Consideration was given to his lifelong and complex encounter with the Modern Orthodox stream of American Judaism and the extent to which his teachings functioned as “the road not taken.” This auspicious gathering was most certainly characterized by deep appreciation for Greenberg’s original outlook, which is predicated on his profound dedication to God, Torah, the Jewish people, and humanity. But this was by no means gratuitous homage or naive esteem. On the contrary, those in attendance understood that the most genuine form of admiration for a thinker and leader of his stature—especially one who continues to produce path-breaking writings and speak out publicly—is to examine rigorously and critically his ideas and legacy. We are confident that the creative process that was nurtured has resulted in a substantive contribution to research on the religious, historical, and social trajectories of contemporary Judaism, and, similarly will engender fresh thinking on crucial theological and ideological postures that will ultimately enrich Jewish life. This volume offers readers a critical engagement with the trenchant and candid efforts of one of the most thoughtful and earnest voices to emerge from within American Orthodoxy to address the theological and moral concerns that characterize our times.

Between the eighth and eleventh centuries, many defining features of classical Sunni Islam began to take shape. Among these was the formation of medieval Sunnism around the belief in the unimpeachable orthodoxy of four eponymous founders and their schools of law. In this original study, Ahmad Khan explores the history and cultural memory of one of these eponymous founders, Abū Ḥanīfa. Showing how Abū Ḥanīfa evolved from being the object of intense religious exclusion to a pillar of Sunni orthodoxy, Khan examines the concepts of orthodoxy and heresy, and outlines their changing meanings over the course of four centuries. He demonstrates that orthodoxy and heresy were neither fixed theological categories, nor pious fictions, but instead were impacted by everything from law and politics, to society and culture. This book illuminates the significant yet often neglected transformations in Islamic social, political and religious thought during this vibrant period.

Liberalism and Orthodoxy can only be succesfull as strategies for coping with change in society when they will be able to outline a recognisable and authentic framework for religiously informed pratcises and ethics.

This volume presents Theodore Abu Qurrah’s apologetic Christian theology in dialogue with Islam. It explores the question of whether, in his attempt to convey orthodoxy in Arabic to the Muslim reader, Abu Qurrah diverged from creedal, doctrinal Christian theology and compromised its core content. A comprehensive study of the theology of Abu Qurrah and its relation to Islamic and pre-Islamic orthodox Melkite thought has not yet been pursued in modern scholarship. Awad addresses this gap in scholarship by offering a thorough analytic hermeneutics of Abu Qurrah’s apologetic thought, with specific attention to his theological thought on the Trinity and Christology. This study takes scholarship beyond attempts at editing and translating Abu Qurrah’s texts and offers scholars, students, and lay readers in the fields of Arabic Christianity, Byzantine theology, Christian-Muslim dialogues, and historical theology an unprecedented scientific study of Abu Qurrah’s theological mind.