Orthodox Constructions of the West [Paperback]

The category of the West has played a particularly significant role in the modern Eastern Orthodox imagination. It has functioned as an absolute marker of difference from what is considered to be the essence of Orthodoxy and, thus, ironically has become a constitutive aspect of the modern Orthodox self. The essays collected in this volume examine the many factors that contributed to the Eastern construction of the West in order to understand why the West is so important to the Eastern Christians sense of self.It ['Orthodox Constructions of the West'] is a goldmine of insights and wonderfully refreshing blunt talk, making it an excellent book for the scholar and general reader alike.

This book represents a significant step in the direction of self-reflection and self-criticism that has almost completely eluded Orthodox identity narratives colored by centuries of political oppression and demographic challenges.
After too long a wait, such an initiative is all the more remarkable: it approaches the prophetic. Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou are to be recognized for having assembled a world-class array of scholars in diverse fields to produce a compilation that is fascinating, accessible, and at points highly challenging. It will inspire heated debate, and will surely become a staging point for future work.

The authors of these essays critique the predominant practice among many leading Orthodox thinkers of defining Orthodoxy as that which Western
Christianity is not. Through successive layers of historical and theoretical
analysis, the volume shakes this dominant paradigm and demonstrates how much more complexand problematicOrthodox constructions of the West are.

The essays collected in this volume represent an ecumenical and interdisciplinary engagement with the numerous factors that have come to comprise the multiple and often ambivalent contours of Eastern Christian attitudes towards an ambiguous, multiform, and ever-changing WelӠ