This book considers a movement within Russian religious philosophy known as "full unity" (vseedinstvo), with a focus on one of its main representatives, Pavel Florensky (1882–1937). Often referred to as "the Russian Leonardo," Florensky was an important figure of the Russian religious renaissance around the beginning of the twentieth century. This book shows that his philosophy, conceptualized in his theory of the icon, brings together the problem of the "religious turn" and the "pictorial turn" in modern culture, as well as contributing to contemporary debates on religion and secularism. Organized around the themes of full unity and visuality, the book examines Florensky’s definition of the icon as "energetic symbol," drawing on St. Gregory Palamas, before offering a theological reading of Florensky’s theory of the pictorial space of the icon. It then turns to Florensky’s idea of space in the icon as Non-Euclidean. Finally, the icon is placed within wider debates provoked by Bolshevik cultural policy, which extend to current discussions concerning religion, modernity, and art. Offering an important contribution from Russian religious philosophy to issues of contemporary modernity, this book will be of interest to scholars of religious philosophy, Russian studies, theology and the arts, and the medieval icon.

The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought is an authoritative new reference and interpretive volume detailing the origins, development, and influence of one of the richest aspects of Russian cultural and intellectual life - its religious ideas. After setting the historical background and context, the Handbook follows the leading figures and movements in modern Russian religious thought through a period of immense historical upheavals, including seventy years of officially atheist communist rule and the growth of an exiled diaspora with, e.g., its journal The Way. Therefore the shape of Russian religious thought cannot be separated from long-running debates with nihilism and atheism. Important thinkers such as Losev and Bakhtin had to guard their words in an environment of religious persecution, whilst some views were shaped by prison experiences. Before the Soviet period, Russian national identity was closely linked with religion - linkages which again are being forged in the new Russia. Relevant in this connection are complex relationships with Judaism. In addition to religious thinkers such as Philaret, Chaadaev, Khomiakov, Kireevsky, Soloviev, Florensky, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Shestov, Frank, Karsavin, and Alexander Men, the Handbook also looks at the role of religion in aesthetics, music, poetry, art, film, and the novelists Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Ideas, institutions, and movements discussed include the Church academies, Slavophilism and Westernism, theosis, the name-glorifying (imiaslavie) controversy, the God-seekers and God-builders, Russian religious idealism and liberalism, and the Neopatristic school. Occultism is considered, as is the role of tradition and the influence of Russian religious thought in the West.

Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) was a Russian philosopher, theologian, and scientist. He was considered by his contemporaries to be a polymath on a par with Pascal or Da Vinci. This book is the first comprehensive study in the English language to examine Florensky's entire philosophical oeuvre in its key metaphysical concepts. For Florensky, antinomy and symbol are the two faces of a single issue—the universal truth of discontinuity. This truth is a general law that represents, better than any other, the innermost structure of the universe. With its original perspective, Florensky’s philosophy is unique in the context of modern Russian thought, but also in the history of philosophy per se.

Theological thought has long been focused on the meaning to be found in our existence, but it has tended to neglect what it might offer to those seeking how to prolong and improve our physical existence in this world. In conversation with twentieth-century materialist art and thought, this book presents a radical theology that engages directly with the political and ecological issues of our time. The book introduces a new thinker to the theological sphere, Russian avantgarde artist Liubov Popova (1889–1924). She was a woman acknowledged for her artistic and intellectual talent and yet is never discussed in relation to the twentieth-century thinkers with whom her ideas have obvious connections. Popova’s art and thought are discussed together with thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze and Paul Tillich, along with ecotheological and theopolitical perspectives. Inspired by the activist creativity of avantgarde art, the book’s final chapter, playfully yet with deadly seriousness, presents a manifesto for radical theology today. This is a work of theological activism that demonstrates the benefit of allowing new voices into the conversations around art, spirituality and our planet. As such, it will be of keen interest to academics in Theology, Religion and the Arts and the Philosophy of Religion.

This book offers a survey of the development of interdisciplinarity in religious studies within academia and offers ways for it to continue to progress in contemporary universities. It examines the use of the term ‘interdisciplinary’ in the context of the academic study of religion and how it shapes the way scholarly work in this field has developed. The text uses two main elements to discuss religious studies as a field. Firstly, it looks at the history of the development of religious studies in academia, as seen through an interdisciplinary critique of the university as an epistemological project. It then uses the same interdisciplinary critique to develop a foundation for a 21st-century hermeneutic, one which uses the classical concepts reprised by that interdisciplinary critique and retools the field for the 21st century. Setting out both the objects of religious studies as a subject and the techniques used to employ the study of those objects, this book offers an invaluable perspective on the progress of the field. It will, therefore, be of great use to scholars of research methods within religious studies.

This book offers an excellent, accessible introduction to the life and thought of Father Pavel Florensky, one of the most prominent religious philosophers of Russia's highly creative Silver Age at the beginning of the twentieth century. Florensky, an Orthodox priest, died in Stalin's gulag in 1937. His writings were long suppressed in the Soviet Union, and Western Protestant and Catholic theologians have known little about him. John Burgess argues that it is time to give Florensky his due. His worldview is as important today as it was during his lifetime: a deep sensitivity to the beauty of the natural world; a conviction that the religious cult?acts of worship and ritual?make human culture possible; and an understanding of the Christian faith as, above all, a way of seeing God's glorious presence in all of creation. The book takes a unique approach by examining Florensky not primarily as an academic philosopher but rather as an Orthodox priest and theologian, who speaks out of his personal religious experience to communicate the Christian faith to people who are seeking truth but do not yet know church life. The book makes an original contribution to Florensky scholarship and literature, especially in the United States, where his colleagues Sergei Bulgakov and Nicholas Berdiaev have been better known. John Burgess is a Protestant theologian who has lived and travelled in Russia, and has visited key places associated with Florensky. The author's experience, even as an outsider, of Orthodox worship and practice?its liturgical cycles, iconography, seasons of fasting and feasting, and monasteries and holy sites?has enabled him to understand Florensky's admonition that one must enter into Orthodoxy in order to understand it (and Florensky's) thinking.

Religion has a significant effect on how Europeans feel about the European Union (EU) and has had an important impact on how people voted in the UK’s ‘Brexit referendum’. This book provides a clear and accessible quantitative study of how religion affects Euroscepticism and political behaviour. It examines how religion has affected support for EU membership since the UK joined the European Economic Community, through to the announcement of the Brexit referendum in 2013, to the referendum itself in 2016. It also explores how religion continues to affect attitudes towards the EU post-Brexit. The volume provides valuable insights into why the UK voted to leave the EU. Furthermore, it highlights how religion affects the way that citizens throughout Europe assess the benefits, costs and values associated with EU membership, and how this may influence public opinion regarding European integration in the future. This timely book will be of important interest to academics and students focusing on religion and public attitudes, contemporary European and British politics as well as think tanks, interest groups and those with an interest in understanding Brexit.

How Divine Images Became Art tells the story of the parallel ‘discovery’ of Russian medieval art and of the Italian ‘primitives’ at the beginning of the twentieth century. While these two developments are well-known, they are usually studied in isolation. Tarasov’s study has the great merit of showing the connection between the art world in Russia and the West, and its impact in the cultural history of the continent in the pre-war period. Drawing on a profound familiarity with Russian sources, some of which are little known to Western scholars, and on equally expert knowledge of Western material and scholarship, Oleg Tarasov presents a fresh perspective on early twentieth-century Russian and Western art. The author demonstrates that during the Belle Époque, the interest in medieval Russian icons and Italian ‘primitives’ lead to the recognition of both as distinctive art forms conveying a powerful spiritual message. Formalist art theory and its influence on art collecting played a major role in this recognition of aesthetic and moral value of ‘primitive’ paintings, and was instrumental in reshaping the perception of divine images as artworks. Ultimately, this monograph represents a significant contribution to our understanding of early twentieth-century art; it will be of interest to art scholars, students and anyone interested in the spiritual and aesthetic revival of religious paintings in the Belle Époque.

Owning the Secular examines three case studies dealing with religious symbols and cultural identity, including two public controversies over the veil in Canada – at the federal level and in the province of Québec – and an ex-Muslim podcaster rethinking her atheist identity in the era of Donald Trump and the alt-right. Drawing on theories of discourse analysis and ideology critique, this study calls attention to an evolution in how secularism, nationalism, and multiculturalism in Euro-Western states are debated and understood as competing groups contest and rearrange the meaning of these terms. This is especially true in the digital age as online cultures have transformed how information is spread, how we imagine our communities, build alliances, and produce shared meaning. From recent attempts to prohibit religious symbols in public, to Trump’s so-called Muslim bans, to growing disenchantment with the promises of digital media, this study turns the lens how nation-states, organizations, and individuals attempt to "own" the secular to manage cultural differences, shore up group identity, and stake a claim to some version of Western values amidst the growing uncertainties of neoliberal capitalism.

Theology and Climate Change examines Progressive Dominion Theology (PDT) as a primary cultural driver of anthropogenic climate change. PDT is a distinctive and Western form of Christian theology out of which the modern scientific revolution and technological modernity arises. Basic attitudes to nature, to instrumental power over nature, and to an understanding of humanity’s relationship with nature are a function of the deep theological preconditions of Western modernity. Much of what we like about Western modernity is indebted to PDT at the same time that this tacit cultural theology is propelling us towards climate disaster. This text argues that the urgent need to change the fundamental operational assumptions of our way of life is now very hard for us to do, because secular modernity is now largely unaware of its tacit theological commitments. Modern consumer society, including the global economy that supports this way of life, could not have the operational signatures it currently has without its distinctive theological origin and its ongoing submerged theological assumptions. Some forms of Christian theology are now acutely aware of this dynamic and are determined to change the modern life-world, from first assumptions up, in order to avert climate disaster. At the same time that other forms of Christian theology – aligned with pragmatic fossil fuel interests – advance climate change skepticism and overtly uphold PDT. Theology is, in fact, crucially integral with the politics of climate change, but this is not often understood in anything more than simplistic and polemically expedient ways in environmental and policy contexts. This text aims to dis-imbed climate change politics from polarized and unfruitful slinging-matches between conservatives and progressives of all or no religious commitments. This fascinating volume is a must read for those with an interest in environmental policy concerns and in culturally embedded first-order belief commitments.