Publications

Since the tenth century, the main religious force in Russia has been Orthodox Christianity. This branch of the Christian Church developed differently from its Western counterpart, Latin Christianity, after the geopolitical paths of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires diverged following the Migration Period in Late Antiquity. The different developments in the Christian East and West also led to distinct path dependencies, which informed the conceptualisation of the boundaries between the religious and the secular spheres. This working paper probes these differences, via an analysis of two important texts from early modern Russia: Feofan Prokopovich’s 1718 Palm Sunday sermon about “The Dignity and Power of the Sovereign,” and his 1721 “Spiritual Regulation.” By focusing on these two documents, whose conceptual foundations arguably shaped the structure of the Russian church for two centuries, the paper provides a first glimpse into the official discourse of religion and its discontents in early eighteenth-century Russia.

Throughout the past years, the Orthodox world has seen numerous political and theological confrontations. New borders have been shaped by churches and states. This only increased in light of the Russian-backed conflict in Ukraine from 2014 and onwards, which has led to new theological lines of thinking, geopolitical confrontations, and an acute need for diplomatic handling of crisis. At the centre is the Russian Orthodox Church’s global role and its effects in Ukraine. The confrontations are born out of a complex entanglement of church politics, theological differences, legal tensions, national allegiances, and the very concrete political and military clashes between nation states. In light of the war in Ukraine, Global Orthodoxy has seen new fault lines in the making. This volume gathers chapters that shed light on these entanglements and their political, theological, and geopolitical consequences. The book is not limited to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, but also includes papers focusing on other nations, churches, and aspects (theological, theoretical, geopolitical, empirical etc.).

Sebastian Rimestand and Emil Hilton Saggau, eds. Fault Lines in the Orthodox World: Geopolitics, Theology, and Diplomacy in Light of the War in Ukraine. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. 

This contribution deals with the question of whether “Buddhism” was reified as an object of knowledge only as a result of it being studied by Western scholars, or whether it was already perceived as a collective entity by the social agents of the tradition before colonial encounter and independently of external observation. Premodern sources from China and Japan strongly indicate that the unity of the tradition founded by the Buddha was beyond question. Buddhists had a pronounced awareness that they belonged to a transregional community. Founded in India, the Buddhist monastic order spread in an unbroken succession of ordained practitioners. Authorised by genealogical succession, the order attended to the memory of the founder, and the preservation, transmission, and interpretation of his teachings. There were a number of emic concepts of representation and self-description. No Western scholarship was needed to construe “Buddhism” as an object.

Kleine, Christoph. “Who Invented Buddhism? Or: What Was Buddhism Before It Was Called Buddhism?” In Conceptualizing Islam: Current Approaches, edited by Frank Peter, Paula Schrode and Ricarda Stegmann, 44–58. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2025.

With the assertion of Buddhism as the dominant religion at the end of the 16th century, a new reflection on the relationship between the secular and the religious commenced among the Mongols. They adopted the Joint Twofold System of Governance formulated in Buddhist Tibet, and adapted it to the Mongolian cultural context. This system of governance is described in the work “The White History”, written in the late 16th century, with the epistemic distinctions between the religious and the secular discursively negotiated in the work. Although the impact of these distinctions on the social differentiations of Mongolian society during the Qing period (1644–1911) remains to be investigated, the “White History” nonetheless provides a valuable insight into pre-modern Mongolian notions of the distinction between the religious and the secular.