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A Modern Orthodox Approach to Spirituality
- Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2011
- pp. 10-23
- 10.1353/scs.2011.0024
- Article
- Additional Information
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The modern Orthodox world faces certain challenges that inform the discussions among Orthodox theological circles the last forty years. Some of the most important of these challenges, especially the ones that can be directly connected with the spiritual tradition of the Christian East, are discussed and analyzed in this article, in order to sketch the profile of modern Orthodoxy. Such challenges include problems that originated in the last few centuries, and yet still affect the life of the Church, such as the close connection of the Orthodox identity with national identity, or the parallel Orthodox jurisdictions in the West, both of which are contrary to the early Orthodox tradition. While such deviations from the tradition came about for practical and pastoral reasons in the past, they are now approached from a spiritual perspective in the Orthodox world. The article concludes with a brief overview of the views of the Orthodox Church on ecclesiology and anthropology, two of the fields that characterize the concerns and the directions it explores at the dawn of the twenty-first century.