This paper investigates the role of the Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity in the deployment of Russian state family policy since 2006. It argues that the holiday is emblematic of a cooperative, rather than synchro- nous, relationship between church and state in the promotion of pronatalism and so-called “traditional family values,” and highlights the ways in which public discourse around the holiday intentionally obscures internal contradictions within the dominant family ideologies of both institutions.
An upsurge in Orthodox anti-ecumenical criticism in 2016 has raised the question of the current state of ecumenism. Examining this topic, the author describes a new form of ecumenical activity associated with the emergence of conservative Christian alliances in defense of traditional values. This “conservative ecumenism,” or “Ecumenism 2.0,” differs from the “classical ecumenism” that arose in the early twentieth century and that continues to be represented today by the World Council of Churches and other ecumenical institutions.
This article focuses on the concept of monarchy with an emphasis on the traditional Russian “autocratic” model. Mikhail Suslov inquires into the ways this concept is being used in today’s Russian Orthodox Church and in the circles of religiously motivated intellectuals.