Alfons Brüning

• Radboud University

This volume tells the story of the interaction between Christianity and law—historically and today, in the traditional heartlands of Christianity and around the globe. Sixty new chapters by leading scholars provide authoritative but accessible accounts of foundational Christian teachings on law and legal thought over the past two millennia as well...

The Orthodox Churches and Human Rights in the 21st century The article examines and explains the relation of current Eastern Orthodox Theology to the concept of Human Rights. Putting the controversies into a larger historical and theological context, it seeks to highlight the conditions of a variety of Orthodox theological positions. Such positions...

The article explores several critical themes in the dialogue between Eastern Christian theology and the concept of Human Dignity and Rights. Despite the publication of a basic document on the issue by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2008 this dialogue currently has reached a dead end. There is some agreement with the Human Rights idea, but a mainstr...

Alfons Brüning examines the interplay of shared Russian and Ukrainian historical experiences and competing visions of autocephaly. Drawing upon Pierre Nora’s concept of sites of memory, the study compares different Russian and Ukrainian historiographic approaches to understanding the branches of Eastern Christianity that trace their origins to Kyiv...

For centuries, throne and alter were considered indivisible in the Russian Empire. Nonetheless, after the outbreak of the First World War, one searches in vain for aggressive church support for the monarchy. The harmony of church and state had eroded. There is nothing analogous to Protestant war theologians or Catholic war sermons. There are theolo...

“The West” continues to be a subject of suspicion for many Orthodox church leaders from Russia—a somewhat surprising carryover from Soviet times to this day. In numerous statements and documents on the mission of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), its leading hierarchs—Patriarch Kirill, Archbishop Hilarion, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, and others—i...

The Orthodox Church has been discussing human rights for several years. Official documents or positions of leading representatives of the church have from time to time caused irritation among Western observers. Upon closer examination of the sociological, historical, and theological backgrounds to these positions, the seemingly sharp contrast betwe...

The early Modern history of Western Europe received the label of an ‘age of confession’ in many recent publications. Reference was being made here to the concept of confessionalization, developed initially in German historiography of the late 1980s, and spread then throughout historiographical science on Western European countries. But what about t...