Full Description
Anthropologically explores the entanglement of theology and politics among contemporary Orthodox Christians.
Much of the anthropological literature on Christianity tends to concentrate on Protestants and Catholics in the Global South. The contemporary scholarly interest in such communities descends from histories of missionization and colonization of these regions, as well as a sense of their theological kinship with the secularized visions of Western political and social life. Orthodox Christianity, however, has largely been rendered marginal in mainstream anthropological engagement because of its theological and social alterity from such Western anthropological traditions of knowledge production. Because of this, Orthodox Christian lifeworlds in and beyond the academy are created, contested, and transformed in relation to various "others," whether they be religious, political, secular, or historical, with an eye toward a discursive opposition between modernity and Orthodoxy.
Each of the essays in Anthropologies of Orthodox Christianity texture a new trajectory in the study of this religious tradition that take seriously the theopolitical aspects of Orthodox life through anthropological inquiry. The volume engages and moves beyond the tension between populist and institutional framings of religion, and critically addresses the ontological gap in both anthropology and theology as social, cultural, and geopolitical interest in Orthodox Christianity continues to expand and grow.
Contents
Foreword vii
Sonja Thomas
Introduction: Thinking About Orthodox Christianity in an Anthropological Perspective 1
Candace Lukasik and Sarah Riccardi-Swartz
PART I: LIVING THEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES
Orthodoxy from the Outside: Palestinian Christian Kinship and the Evangelical Theology of Love 33
Clayton Goodgame
Imperial Ecclesiologies and Ethnographic Imaginaries:
Situating Syriac Christianity in the Anthropology of Global Orthodoxy 63
Sarah Bakker Kellogg
The Lives of Priests in the Coptic Imagination 92
Aaron Michka
PART II: SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION AND ORTHODOX THEOLOGIES
Hagiographic Emplacement: St. Servatius, the Armenian
Community of Maastricht, and Oriental Orthodox Christians in Europe 121
Christopher Sheklian
Dynamic Honor: How Ethiopian Orthodox Keber Mediates
the Secular, the Islamic, and the Religiously Plural 154
John Dulin
The State of Grace: Old Believers' Determinations
of Coreligiosity and Moral Life in the Days Between the Mysteries 182
Amber Lee Silva
PART III: THEOLOGICAL ANXIETIES AND CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS
The Heresy of Eastern Papizm in Russian Orthodox Online Discourse 215
Jacob Lassin
UFOs, Conspiracy, and American Eastern Orthodoxy: Narrative Performance of the "Patristic Mind" 251
Robert C. Saler
Afterword 274
Angie Heo
Acknowledgments 281
List of Contributors 283
Index 287
