ABSTRACT
With approximately 200 to 300 million adherents worldwide, Orthodox Christianity is among the largest branches of Christianity, yet it remains relatively understudied. 1 Orthodox Christianity is still often cast in the role of the “subaltern Other” and falls victim to a latent yet widespread Orientalism. In Western Europe and North America, knowledge of Orthodox Christianity is all too frequently tainted by negative stereotypes, partiality and partisanship. 2 This volume examines the variety of entanglements between Orthodox Christianity and globalization. At the heart of the arguments pursued in the book’s chapters lies an effort to show the rich and complex nature of these entanglements. With this effort, the book aims to make a substantive contribution to the relationship between religion and globalization as well as to the relationship between Orthodox Christianity and the sociology of religion—and more broadly, to the interdisciplinary field of religious studies. To the extent possible, the book has been written with the goal of rendering the arguments accessible even to nonspecialist readers. Although the book is deeply engaged with history, its objectives are not to offer a history of Orthodox Christianity as a world religion, to address theological issues or to exhaustively cover all the individual trajectories of each subgroup or subdivision of the faith. Orthodox Christianity is the object of the analysis, but the goal is to speak to a broader audience interested in the general themes of culture, religion and globalization. The broader objective is to use the historical record of Orthodox Christianity as empirical material to theorize the varied historical entanglements between local cultures and world religions within the context of world-historical globalization.
