Sebastian Rimestad – författare

This book analyses the discourses of Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe to demonstrate the emerging discrepancies between the mother Church in the East and its newer Western congregations. Showing the genesis and development of these discourses over the twentieth century, it examines the challenges the Orthodox Church is facing in the modern world.

Organised along four different discursive fields, the book uses these fields to analyse the Orthodox Church in Western Europe during the twentieth century. It explores pastoral, ecclesiological, institutional and ecumenical discourses in order to present a holistic view of how the Church views itself and how it seeks to interact with other denominations. Taken together, these four fields reveal a discursive vitality outside of the traditionally Orthodox societies that is, however, only partly reabsorbed by the church hierarchs in core Orthodox regions, like Southeast Europe and Russia.

The Orthodox Church is a complex and multi-faceted global reality.Therefore, this book will be a vital guide to scholars studying the Orthodox Church, ecumenism and religion in Europe, as well as those working in religious studies, sociology of religion, and theology more generally.

This book analyses the discourses of Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe to demonstrate the emerging discrepancies between the mother Church in the East and its newer Western congregations. Showing the genesis and development of these discourses over the twentieth century, it examines the challenges the Orthodox Church is facing in the modern world.

Organised along four different discursive fields, the book uses these fields to analyse the Orthodox Church in Western Europe during the twentieth century. It explores pastoral, ecclesiological, institutional and ecumenical discourses in order to present a holistic view of how the Church views itself and how it seeks to interact with other denominations. Taken together, these four fields reveal a discursive vitality outside of the traditionally Orthodox societies that is, however, only partly reabsorbed by the church hierarchs in core Orthodox regions, like Southeast Europe and Russia.

The Orthodox Church is a complex and multi-faceted global reality.Therefore, this book will be a vital guide to scholars studying the Orthodox Church, ecumenism and religion in Europe, as well as those working in religious studies, sociology of religion, and theology more generally.

Throughout the past years, the Orthodox world has seen numerous political and theological confrontations. New borders have been shaped by churches and states. This only increased in light of the Russian-backed conflict in Ukraine from 2014 and onwards, which has led to new theological lines of thinking, geopolitical confrontations, and an acute need for diplomatic handling of crisis. At the centre is the Russian Orthodox Church’s global role and its effects in Ukraine. The confrontations are born out of a complex entanglement of church politics, theological differences, legal tensions, national allegiances, and the very concrete political and military clashes between nation states. In light of the war in Ukraine, Global Orthodoxy has seen new fault lines in the making. This volume gathers chapters that shed light on these entanglements and their political, theological, and geopolitical consequences. The book is not limited to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, but also includes papers focusing on other nations, churches, and aspects (theological, theoretical, geopolitical, empirical etc.).