Project MUSE®: Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies.daily12026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2018) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal of Orthodox Christian StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies2574-49682574-495XLatest articles in Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Who Wakes the Waker? The Monastic Relationship to Time in Byzantium
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977875
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Telling time in Byzantium—that is, the act of dividing the day and night into distinct parts and using the measurement of those parts to refer to specific moments throughout the day and night—is relatively understudied compared to, say, the measure of calendrical time or liturgical time in Byzantium. Yet it is clear that telling time was an essential part of life for Eastern Romans and early Christians from very early on. We see in Matthew 20:3–5, for example, in the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, that the day was divided into twelve hours and that these divisions were useful in the arena of labor and commerce. Christ tells the story of a landowner who went to a marketplace early in the morning to hire
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallWho Wakes the Waker? The Monastic Relationship to Time in Byzantium2025-12-16text/htmlen-USWho Wakes the Waker? The Monastic Relationship to Time in Byzantium2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®1960582026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16A Monastery in the Sands: The Greek Orthodox Rural Estate in Caesarea, Israel
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977876
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Dedicated to the memory of Muhammad Hafez al-Qeisi, a participant in a century of changeThis article discusses the territorial and agricultural activities of the Greek Orthodox Church (henceforth, the Church) in Caesarea Maritima/Qisārya,1 Israel—specifically, its Caesarea monastery. The Caesarea monastery was built in 1909 and existed until the 1940s, a period covering the last years of Ottoman sovereignty, the British Mandate, and the establishment of the State of Israel. The monastery consisted of residential and sacred properties in the Bosnian town established ca. 1880 among the walls of Caesarea (figure 1). These properties included Saint Paul’s supposed prison cellar and the remains of the Crusader
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallA Monastery in the Sands: The Greek Orthodox Rural Estate in Caesarea, Israel2025-12-16text/htmlen-USA Monastery in the Sands: The Greek Orthodox Rural Estate in Caesarea, Israel2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®1414322026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Between Antioch and Seleucia-Ctesiphon: The Canonical Status of the Iberian (Eastern Georgian) Church During Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977877
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Almost all Georgian and non-Georgian sources agree that the Iberian Kingdom was converted to Christianity by a young Christian virgin often described as a“captive,”1 whose name, according to the later Georgian literary tradition, was Nino.2 As late antique and early medieval accounts report, Nino was born to Roman aristocratic parents and from her early life she devoted herself to Christian asceticism and missionary activity. Nino started to preach in Mc’xet’a, the capital city of the Iberian Kingdom. First, she converted the queen, then king Mirian III (ca. 284–362),3 and finally the whole kingdom.4 After the conversion, King Mirian sent his envoys to the emperor Constantine to ask for clergy for the newly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallBetween Antioch and Seleucia-Ctesiphon: The Canonical Status of the Iberian (Eastern Georgian) Church During Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages2025-12-16text/htmlen-USBetween Antioch and Seleucia-Ctesiphon: The Canonical Status of the Iberian (Eastern Georgian) Church During Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®1634232026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Orthodox War: History, Tradition, and the Christian Soldiers of Holy Rus’
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977878
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On May 8, 2022, Patriarch Kirill (Gundiaev) of Moscow and All Rus’ presided over services at the Patriarchal Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, better known as the Main Cathedral of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.1 The televised and livestreamed service was weighted with Christian meaning, historical solemnity, and national urgency. The head of the Russian Church was not only commemorating the Third Sunday of Easter and the seventy-seventh anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War (1941–45). Kirill was also celebrating liturgy against the backdrop of Russia’s then-recent invasion of Ukraine, which in less than three months had killed or wounded thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallOrthodox War: History, Tradition, and the Christian Soldiers of Holy Rus’2025-12-16text/htmlen-USOrthodox War: History, Tradition, and the Christian Soldiers of Holy Rus’2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®1651392026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Spectral Iconography: Toward a Hauntology of the Orthodox Icon
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977879
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Readers of The Observer in 1986 were met with a puzzling headline: “Icons: Ghosts of Russia’s Holy Past.”1 The corresponding article makes no reference to specters, hauntings, or even the Holy Ghost; rather, Peter Watson’s column uses the occasion of a forthcoming sale at Sotheby’s to provide his readers with a brief overview of the history and importance of icons within Eastern Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, the editor who likely affixed the title to the article detected a certain resonance between these objects of religious veneration and the world of ghosts. Interestingly, the use of the word ghost seems to lose its typical negative or nefarious connotations, referring rather neutrally to the ability of apparitions
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallSpectral Iconography: Toward a Hauntology of the Orthodox Icon2025-12-16text/htmlen-USSpectral Iconography: Toward a Hauntology of the Orthodox Icon2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®1030972026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Holy War: The Untold Story of Catholic Italy’s Crusade against the Ethiopian Orthodox Church by Ian Campbell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977880
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There were two wars between Ethiopia and Italy. The first took place between 1889 and 1896, and ended with the defeat of the Italian army by the Emperor Menelik’s larger but less well-equipped army at Adwa on March 1, 1896. This victory ensured that Ethiopia remained uncolonized by European powers and inaugurated the modern history of Ethiopia. It was also the first occasion that an African army defeated a European one since Hannibal crossed the Alps and invaded Italy in 218 BCE. The second war arose out of Mussolini’s ambitions to build an empire in East Africa, as well as to avenge the defeat at Adwa. These hostilities began when Italian forces crossed the frontier into Ethiopia in October 1935. The Italians
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallHoly War: The Untold Story of Catholic Italy’s Crusade against the Ethiopian Orthodox Church by Ian Campbell (review)2025-12-16text/htmlen-USHoly War: The Untold Story of Catholic Italy’s Crusade against the Ethiopian Orthodox Church by Ian Campbell (review)2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®95612026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Church of Our Granddaughters by Carrie Frederick Frost (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977881
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This book courageously addresses the central theological and moral questions confronting the Orthodox Church in the twenty-first century. Dr. Carrie Frederick Frost stakes her claim to “the real possibility that the Orthodox Church could begin to live out its teachings more adequately and bring about healing for women, providing dignity, succor, support, and sustenance, so that no one need ask or wonder ‘How can you stand it.’” I approach this review with deep respect for Orthodox churches worldwide, bringing my perspective as a seventy-eight-year-old woman with one daughter, one granddaughter, and two grandsons—none of whom is a practicing Catholic.Dr. Frost begins with theological anthropology, examining how
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallChurch of Our Granddaughters by Carrie Frederick Frost (review)2025-12-16text/htmlen-USChurch of Our Granddaughters by Carrie Frederick Frost (review)2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®107742026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Theological Reflection in Eighteenth-Century Russia by Adam Drozdek (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977882
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Michel de Certeau once wrote that the historian “promotes a selection between what can be understood and what must be forgotten in order to obtain the representation of a present intelligibility” (The Writing of History [New York, 1988], 35). In overburdened prose, de Certeau means to say that the writing of history begins with a decision—“with the gesture of setting aside” (72). That decision will mean selecting one subject—“transforming certain classified objects into documents”—as always already not selecting another. History sorts and organizes and curates precisely by dividing and policing and scrapping. Or it understands one past only because it forgets another. In this way, history offers the present
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallTheological Reflection in Eighteenth-Century Russia by Adam Drozdek (review)2025-12-16text/htmlen-USTheological Reflection in Eighteenth-Century Russia by Adam Drozdek (review)2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®94502026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Unflnished Christians: Ritual Objects and Silent Subjects in Late Antiquity by Georgia Frank (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977883
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It is difficult to guess the content of this impressive book on the basis of its title. My first reaction was to question the words “Unfinished Christians.” What does the author mean by this expression and how does it relate to the subtitle, Ritual Objects and Silent Subjects in Late Antiquity? The answer is provided in Georgia Frank’s introductory chapter, which sets out problems and methods for studying the daily religious experience of ordinary Christians in late antique cities. In a late Roman world in which Christianity had only recently become the majority religion (between approximately 312 CE and the end of the sixth century), many followers of Jesus Christ were still being catechized and baptized as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallUnflnished Christians: Ritual Objects and Silent Subjects in Late Antiquity by Georgia Frank (review)2025-12-16text/htmlen-USUnflnished Christians: Ritual Objects and Silent Subjects in Late Antiquity by Georgia Frank (review)2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®95142026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Orthodoxy and the Imperial Idea: The Transformation of the Orthodox Church in Late Byzantium by Norman Russell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977884
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Readers of this journal will find everything Normal Russell publishes to be of interest. He is one of the foremost experts on the development of the Orthodox concept of deification and a nuanced interpreter of the late Byzantine Hesychast/Palamite debates, and his new book offers an intriguing thesis on the ways in which the Orthodox Church reconceptualized its relationship to imperial authority. In short, he believes that the Church underwent a series of minor transformations and reevaluations of the role of the emperor in late Byzantium (i.e., 1261–1453), and that these recalibrations preemptively enabled the Church to survive during the Ottoman period.Structurally, Orthodoxy and the Imperial Idea includes an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallOrthodoxy and the Imperial Idea: The Transformation of the Orthodox Church in Late Byzantium by Norman Russell (review)2025-12-16text/htmlen-USOrthodoxy and the Imperial Idea: The Transformation of the Orthodox Church in Late Byzantium by Norman Russell (review)2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®86162026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Sonic Icons: Relation, Recognition, and Revival in a Syriac World by Sarah Bakker Kellogg (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977885
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Sarah Bakker Kellogg’s Sonic Icons is an anthropological, historical, sociological, and liturgical tour de force through a world not well known outside of specialist circles: Syriac Orthodox communities living in “diaspora” (a term I am not fond of but use here for want of anything better) in Holland. The results of a decade of fieldwork, Sonic Icons provides a window into a particular world, but also a world that itself is experiencing the challenges to community, identity, and language presented by life in a secular society.This is an important book for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that such communities of Christians displaced from their historical homelands exist throughout Europe
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallSonic Icons: Relation, Recognition, and Revival in a Syriac World by Sarah Bakker Kellogg (review)2025-12-16text/htmlen-USSonic Icons: Relation, Recognition, and Revival in a Syriac World by Sarah Bakker Kellogg (review)2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®61982026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Orthodox Christians and the Rights Revolution in America by Anthony G. Roeber (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977886
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The engagement of Orthodox Christianity with the contemporary challenges of late modernity represents a crucial area of scholarship. The significance of this area stems from both the pressing issues prompted by recent cultural and geopolitical shifts, which question Orthodoxy’s self-understanding at global level, and its potential to enhance Orthodox Christian studies. Anthony G. Roeber’s Orthodox Christians and the Rights Revolution in America aligns with this line of inquiry and its potential outcomes, offering a pioneering approach to a controversial topic: the relationship between Orthodox Christianity and human rights. In other words, how “the Orthodox, along with other Christians, struggle with the manner in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallOrthodox Christians and the Rights Revolution in America by Anthony G. Roeber (review)2025-12-16text/htmlen-USOrthodox Christians and the Rights Revolution in America by Anthony G. Roeber (review)2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®93392026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Icon of the Kingdom of God: An Orthodox Ecclesiology by Radu Bordeianu (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977887
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Radu Bordeianu is currently professor of theology at Duquesne University, where he is also the director of graduate studies in theology. He is a well-known Orthodox priest-theologian who studied for his first degrees in Romania and then defended his ThM from Duke and finally his PhD from Marquette in 2016, already with serious publications to his name. He brings to his task, in this new and important study of Orthodox ecclesiology, a long pastoral experience and an enduring interest in ecumenical thought and in issues of ecclesiological renewal. The title of his first book reveals his long-standing involvement with causes of ecumenical concern to the Church: Dumitru Staniloae: An Ecumenical Ecclesiology (2011). The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallIcon of the Kingdom of God: An Orthodox Ecclesiology by Radu Bordeianu (review)2025-12-16text/htmlen-USIcon of the Kingdom of God: An Orthodox Ecclesiology by Radu Bordeianu (review)2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®76802026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16The Phenomenology of the Icon: Mediating God through the Image by Stephanie Rumpza (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977888
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Stephanie Rumpza’s remarkably comprehensive book The Phenomenology of the Icon explores the significance of the icon as a possible created medium of God’s self-communication. While the subject of iconic mediation has been approached extensively by art historians and theologians, Rumpza approaches the icon from the more general standpoint of phenomenology to probe what it might mean for a finite entity to mediate God’s presence and to raise the question of how icons claim to do this according to Eastern Christian thought and practice.For Rumpza, aesthetic, historical, and theological reflections on icons provide crucial insights into their meaning from within their respective disciplinary limits but fail to relate
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallThe Phenomenology of the Icon: Mediating God through the Image by Stephanie Rumpza (review)2025-12-16text/htmlen-USThe Phenomenology of the Icon: Mediating God through the Image by Stephanie Rumpza (review)2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®107222026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Deiflcation and Modern Orthodox Theology: Introduction to Contemporary Debates by Petre Maican (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977889
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This slim volume, coming in at a little over 100 pages of text, is presented as a “research guide” to modern Orthodox theology viewed through the prism of deification. The author correctly notes that deification is regularly adduced as a prime feature of Orthodox theology and sets out to test that claim. The results are mixed: deification emerges as a driving force in some areas, specifically “Trinity” and “Anthropology,” but is less clear in “Tradition and Experience” and somewhat lacking in“Ecclesiology.” These four divisions represent the four headings under which the author tackles modern Orthodox theology. It will not take much of an eagle eye to note that Christology is missing—a rather glaring lacuna given
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallDeiflcation and Modern Orthodox Theology: Introduction to Contemporary Debates by Petre Maican (review)2025-12-16text/htmlen-USDeiflcation and Modern Orthodox Theology: Introduction to Contemporary Debates by Petre Maican (review)2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®61122026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16‘Elonei Mamre: The Encounter of Judaism and Orthodox Christianity’ ed. by Nicholas de Lange, Elena Narinskaya and Sybil Sheridan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977890
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‘Elonei Mamre: The Encouter of Judaism and Orthodox Christianity’ is an important and timely development in Christian-Jewish relations, filling a gap in scholarship with an insightful, focused, and rigorous collection of essays on the relationship between Judaism and Orthodox Christianity.Christian-Jewish relations have changed profoundly within the last eighty years. Following the Holocaust, a fundamental reassessment of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism began. Traditions of Christian polemic against Judaism were interrogated, and the strain of anti-Judaism (which had been so firmly established in many Christian hermeneutics and which has caused so much harm to Jewish communities) was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmall‘Elonei Mamre: The Encounter of Judaism and Orthodox Christianity’ ed. by Nicholas de Lange, Elena Narinskaya and Sybil Sheridan (review)2025-12-16text/htmlen-US‘Elonei Mamre: The Encounter of Judaism and Orthodox Christianity’ ed. by Nicholas de Lange, Elena Narinskaya and Sybil Sheridan (review)2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®90232026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16The Marian Apparitions at Zeitoun: An Evidential Inquiry by Travis Dumsday (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977891
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The Marian apparitions that began in Zeitoun, north of Cairo, in 1968 have been slow to receive substantial academic attention. To be sure, over the last five and a half decades there emerged useful devotional texts (e.g., Pearl Zaki’s Our Lord’s Mother Visits Egypt in 1968 [1977] and Francis Johnston’s When Millions Saw Mary [1980]), media programs, and a handful of book chapters, dissertations, and peer-reviewed articles, among others. One early exception was its inclusion, even though abbreviated and incomplete, in Coptologist Otto Meinardus’s Christian Egypt: Faith and Life (1970). But it was not until 2019 that Valeria Céspedes Musso’s Marian Apparitions in Cultural Contexts: Applying Jungian Concepts to Mass
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallThe Marian Apparitions at Zeitoun: An Evidential Inquiry by Travis Dumsday (review)2025-12-16text/htmlen-USThe Marian Apparitions at Zeitoun: An Evidential Inquiry by Travis Dumsday (review)2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®90432026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16Orthodox Christianity and the COVID-19 Pandemic ed. by Tornike Metreveli (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977892
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This book provides a fascinating view of eight different perspectives on the COVID-19 crisis, examining social, political, and religious attitudes that influenced the Church’s response to the pandemic in Orthodox countries (Ukraine, Romania/Bulgaria, Georgia, Serbia/Montenegro, Greece/Cyprus, Russia) and in two countries influenced by their own Orthodox populations (Sweden, Finland), and then the response to vaccination in several countries. The book is the result of a two-year project funded by the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. The introduction successfully lays out the goals of the work.The first chapter, by Tetiana Kalenychenko, Cyril Hovorun, and Timofii
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/719/image/coversmallOrthodox Christianity and the COVID-19 Pandemic ed. by Tornike Metreveli (review)2025-12-16text/htmlen-USOrthodox Christianity and the COVID-19 Pandemic ed. by Tornike Metreveli (review)2025-12-162025TWOProject MUSE®94702026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-12-16