Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine

Description

For students of the interaction of state building, nation building, and religion, Ukraine constitutes one of the most important case studies at the dawn of the twenty-first century. With more than forty-eight million inhabitants, Ukraine is the second most populous state to emerge from the break-up of the former Soviet Bloc. Ukraine contains one of the largest Orthodox communities in the world. Alongside the millions of Orthodox faithful are more than three thousand Ukrainian Greek Catholic parishes, which constitute the largest Eastern Christian church in the world united with Rome.

Chapters include:

• The Formation of Modern Ukrainian Religious Culture: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
• The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Traditions of the Kyiv Metropolitanate
• The Crisis of “Holy-Rus'”: The Russian Orthodox Mission and the Establishment of the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church of Canada
• The Ukrainian Orthodox Question in the USSR
• The Third Rebirth of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Religious Situation in Ukraine, 1989-1991
• The Russian Sobor and the Rejection of Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephaly
• Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephaly and Metropolitan Filaret
• Kyiv vs. Moscow: The Autocephalous Movement in Independent Ukraine
• Between Moscow and Rome: The Struggle for a Ukrainian Greek Catholic Patriarchate
• Church, State, and Nation in Ukraine

Much of the analysis presented in the essays that make up this book deals with the responses of Ukraine’s Eastern Christians to the challenge of the national idea. The book places the history and current status of Ukraine’s Orthodox and Greek Catholic communities into the context of the modern Ukrainian national revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the resurgence of Ukrainian national consciousness in the late 1980s and early 1990s.