Book Review: The Orthodox Church in Ukraine: A Century of Separation

“Fog of war” commonly names the complete lack of situational awareness amidst a singular lethal engagement, but it may also describe the absence of clarity regarding the foundational reasons, societal dimensions, and collateral impact of years of continuous armed combat. Denysenko’s book provides the necessary bearings for navigating within a mist of ecclesial conflict pitting opposing sides of an effort to establish an autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church apart from the Moscow Patriarchate, a fray that also extends to impact global Orthodox interchurch relations. Indeed, the fallout from this seemingly intractable clashing looks to roil global Orthodoxy through the foreseeable future. The author, an ordained deacon of the Orthodox Church in America and Valparaiso University’s Emil and Elfriede Jochum Professor and Chair (Theology), dedicated himself to the project of making semblance of the neuralgic historical factors and dynamics of the Ukrainian Church’s modern autocephaly movement. The study’s time frame reaches back a tick over one hundred years to the runup to the 1918 Sobor that secured autonomous status for the forming and self-standing Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The impressively substantial bibliography comprises names of eminent scholars, researchers, and commentators, from Antoine Arjakovsky and Bohdan Bociurkiw through to Aleksandr Verkhovsky and Met. Kallistos Ware, and more. Beyond these, Denysenko venturesomely plumbs the heretofore unpublished archival materials such as those of Tymofii Minenko and Yaroslaw Lozowchuck

Resolvents of cone pseudodifferential operators, asymptotic expansions and applications

We study the structure and asymptotic behavior of the resolvent of elliptic cone pseudodifferential operators acting on weighted Sobolev spaces over a compact manifold with boundary. We obtain an asymptotic expansion of the resolvent as the spectral parameter tends to infinity, and use it to derive corresponding heat trace and zeta function expansions as well as an analytic index formula.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figure