“The Russia Question” Hosts Emerson, Poole, and Pattison

“The Russia Question” is a book talk series devoted to all things Russia, hosted by professor Michael Ossorgin, Russian program director at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus, with generous support from the Orthodox Christian Studies Center. Join us for a book talk with Caryl Emerson, Randall Poole, and George Pattison for their Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought (Oxford University Press, 2019).

The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought is an authoritative reference and interpretive volume detailing the origins, development, and influence of one of the richest aspects of Russian cultural and intellectual life: its religious ideas. After setting the historical background and context, the book follows the leading figures and movements in modern Russian religious thought through a period of immense historical upheavals, including 70 years of officially atheist communist rule and the growth of an exiled diaspora with (e.g., its journal The Way). Therefore, the shape of Russian religious thought cannot be separated from long-running debates with nihilism and atheism. Important thinkers, such as Losev and Bakhtin, had to guard their words in an environment of religious persecution, whilst some views were shaped by prison experiences.

Before the Soviet period, Russian national identity was closely linked with religion—linkages that again are being forged in the new Russia. Relevant in this connection are complex relationships with Judaism. In addition to such religious thinkers as Philaret, Chaadaev, Khomiakov, Kireevsky, Soloviev, Florensky, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Shestov, Frank, Karsavin, and Alexander Men, the Handbook also looks at the role of religion in aesthetics, music, poetry, art, film, and the novelists Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Ideas, institutions, and movements discussed include the church academies, Slavophilism and Westernism, theosis, the name-glorifying (imiaslavie) controversy, the God-seekers and God-builders, Russian religious idealism and liberalism, and the neopatristic school. Occultism is considered, as is the role of tradition and the influence of Russian religious thought in the west. The collection includes two responses from contemporary Russian academic and church life.

About the Speakers
Caryl Emerson is the A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her work has focused on the Russian classics (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevskii); Mikhail Bakhtin; and Russian music, opera, and theater. Recent projects include the Russian modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii (1887 to 1950), the allegorical-historical novelist Vladimir Sharov (1952 to 2018), and the co-editing, with George Pattison and Randall A. Poole, of The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought.

Randall A. Poole is a professor of intellectual history at the College of St. Scholastica and a fellow of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. He is the translator and editor of Problems of Idealism: Essays in Russian Social Philosophy (2003) and co-editor of five other volumes: A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity (2010, 2013), Religious Freedom in Modern Russia (2018), The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought (2021), Evgenii Trubetskoi: Icon and Philosophy (2021), and Law and the Christian Tradition in Modern Russia (2022). He is also the author of many articles and book chapters on Russian intellectual history, philosophy, and religion.

George Pattison is a retired Anglican priest and scholar. His primary research area has been the post-Hegelian philosophy of religion, with emphasis on Kierkegaard, Russian religious thought, Heidegger, and visual art. He has recently completed a three-part philosophy of Christian life, pub listed by Oxford University Press (2018, 2019, 2021).