Gregory the Great and a Post-Imperial Discourse

Last Spring, quite out of the blue, I stumbled upon an essay by Catherine Keller that was so provocative that I am no longer able to think about the relationship between Christianity and Empire as I once did. It is not that I found her conclusions to be especially persuasive but rather I was transfixed by the profound insight with which she begins. Her first sentence reads: “Christianity suffers from an imperial condition.” A paragraph or so later she observes, “When [Christianity] opened its young mouth to speak, it spoke in the many tongues of empire—nations and languages colonized by Rome, and before that Greece, and before that Babylon, which had first dispersed the Jews into an imperial space.” Keller rightly identifies Christianity’s transitions from its subaltern position, to its adoption of imperial symbols, and then its ascendance to an imperial status of its own. The bulk of her essay is devoted to an argument for the compatibility of postcolonial critique and the Christian theology of love

Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine

The collapse of communism in eastern Europe has forced traditionally Eastern Orthodox countries to consider the relationship between Christianity and liberal democracy. Contributors examine the influence of Constantinianism in both the post-communist Orthodox world and in Western political theology. Constructive theological essays feature Catholic and Protestant theologians reflecting on the relationship between Christianity and democracy, as well as Orthodox theologians reflecting on their tradition’s relationship to liberal democracy. The essays explore prospects of a distinctively Christian politics in a post-communist, post-Constantinian age

Power and Authority in Eastern Christian Experience: Papers of the Sophia Institute Academic Conference New York, December 2010

The essays in this volume were delivered at the Third Annual Conference of the Sophia Institute in December 2010 at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The theme of that conference, “Power and Authority in Eastern Christian Experience,” brought forth a diverse group of scholars who contributed their perspectives on the ways the Eastern Orthodox Church, in its broadest sense, has negotiated the notions of power, authority, (dis)obedience, and resistance over time and space. These insightful essays promise to draw the Orthodox world into a dynamic and productive discourse

Colonizing Christianity

Colonizing Christianity employs postcolonial critique to analyze the transformations of Greek and Latin religious identity in the wake of the Fourth Crusade. It argues that the experience of colonization splintered the Greek community, which could not agree how best to respond to the Latin other. By offering a close reading of a handful of texts from the era of the Fourth Crusade and subsequent Latin Empire of Byzantium, this book illuminates mechanisms by which Western Christians authorized and exploited the Christian East and, concurrently, the ways in which Eastern Christians understood and responded to the dramatic shift in their political and religious fortunes. It offers new insights into the statements of Greek and Latin religious polemic that emerged in the context of the Fourth Crusade and how they more often revealed political or cultural anxiety than they advanced theological ideas. It further demonstrates how the experience of colonial subjugation not only transformed the way that Eastern Christians viewed themselves and the Western Christian other but also how the experience of colonialism opened permanent fissures within the Orthodox community. George E. Demacopoulos is Fr. John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies at Fordham University

Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine

The collapse of communism in eastern Europe has forced traditionally Eastern Orthodox countries to consider the relationship between Christianity and liberal democracy. Contributors examine the influence of Constantinianism in both the post-communist Orthodox world and in Western political theology. Constructive theological essays feature Catholic and Protestant theologians reflecting on the relationship between Christianity and democracy, as well as Orthodox theologians reflecting on their tradition’s relationship to liberal democracy. The essays explore prospects of a distinctively Christian politics in a post-communist, post-Constantinian age