This paper examines Christian icons in Panjab, in northern India, and their relationship to the larger discourse on race, iconoclasm, and decentering Whiteness in the United States. I analyze the appropriation of Panjabi idioms woven into Christian i...
The Virgin Mother Mary has always been venerated in Eastern Christianity far beyond her scriptural role. In this paper, we propose a symbolic framework of deep culture and apply it to understanding the prominence of Mary and the manner in which she p...
The cultural renaissance in 20th-century India has fostered an aesthetic integration of contemplative mysticism with popular religious practices, influencing various artistic and theological movements. This paper examines Christian artist Joy Elamkun...
The division that occurred in the Patriarchate of Muscovy in the middle of the 17th century resulted in a large part of the believers being alienated from the clergy; in consequence, many communities of the Old Believers, who had come to terms with t...
Joseph Ratzinger points to the dialogical nature of the human being. Indeed, the human is by nature called to live in relationships, and for him/her social life is a natural environment of existence. This need, which humans discover within themselves...
Although traditionally associated with Eastern Christianity, the practice of venerating icons became deeply rooted in the Catholic societies of the broad Adriatic region from the Late Middle Ages onwards and was an indispensable part of everyday popu...
The story of the patriarch Joseph is a very recurring theme in medieval visual artistic Christian tradition. Joseph, Jacob’s beloved son, is a prefiguration of Christ. The story in Genesis 41, 37–44 fosters the creation of two iconographi...
The carved figural program of the tenth-century Gosforth Cross (Cumbria) has long been considered to depict Norse mythological episodes, leaving the potential Christian iconographic import of its Crucifixion carving underexplored. The scheme is analy...
Religious panel paintings (icons) play a pivotal role in the rituals of the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church. However, their continuous use often results in physical degradation, prompting remedial interventions. Quite commonly, alterations were tre...
This paper explores the models of the providential-erotic descent in Neoplatonism and Christianity and the ethical consequences that these two models entail. Neoplatonic representative is an excerpt from Proclus’ Commentary on the First Alcibiades, w...
The Orthodox Church is known for its liturgical aesthetics. The rich liturgical cycle consists of several liturgical offices celebrated throughout the year, complete with icons, chant, polyphony, and powerful ritual gestures. The Divine Liturgy is th...
This paper starts from the assumption that the human individual and its concomitant, the human body, are conceivably idols of secularism. There is a certain irony, perhaps an irony shared with all idols, that such idolatry is so close to, and yet so...
This paper focuses on one specific theological tool regarding some Christian ritual practices, i.e., the character indelebilis or indelible mark. Though the notion existed in some patristic sources, the theologoumenon was reframed in early scholastic...
Although dance as a topic has been explored through various theoretical and thematic discourse, little attention has been paid to the presence of dance motifs in Christian imagery. An examination of Orthodox Macedonian medieval fresco painting provid...
This article explores the ways in which the newly founded and highly contested Christian confession of the Greek Catholics or Uniates employed strategies of mass mobilization to establish and maintain their position within a contested confessional te...
The Church of England’s historic buildings represent the single largest group of heritage sites in the UK, playing a key public-facing role in the church’s ‘cultural witness’. However, they are complex historic environments im...
Some of Spain’s greatest humanists—Juan Luis Vives, Antonio de Nebrija, Juan de Ávila, Luis de León, and Benito Arias Montano—were from a converso background. Recent scholarship suggests that two of the three most infl...
The Middle Ages and Early Modern periods saw the interpretation of reality through symbols, connecting the natural world to the divine using symbolic thinking and images. The idea of a correspondence between the human and universal macrocosm was prom...
This article examines Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist art in the context of negative (apophatic) theology, as a crucial tool in analyzing both the artist’s theoretical conclusions and his new visual optics. Our analysis rests on the point that the art...
The holiness of sacred spaces is expressed through the creative synthesis and performance of different symbolic or iconic elements. This article concentrates on the medieval church of Ayios Iakovos in Nicosia, Cyprus. Dedicated to Saint James the Per...
The Triune God is not indifferent to the human condition. This article, “The Trinitarian Koinōnia and Its Socio-Economic Implications,” intends to reflect on the inspiration and the critique of the Holy Trinity on human society. It a...
This study explores Eastern Orthodox aesthetics through a parallax lens, situating it at the intersection of theology, anthropology, and cultural practice to move beyond the icon-centric discourse. It examines how Orthodox aesthetics, rooted in the t...
This paper is drawn from a research project that investigates the relationship between teachers’ understanding of the religious identity of Asian background students, and recent Australian curriculum initiatives focused on religion and religious iden...
The collective ritual of building one-day votive churches (obydennye khramy) was practiced in the European north of Russia between the late 14th and 17th centuries. The product of a syncretism between Orthodox Christianity and native folklore, the ri...