This pie chart was published on the website of the Public Religion Research Institute. PRRI describes itself as “a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to conducting independent research at the intersection of religion, culture, and public policy.” It goes on to say:

PRRI’s research explores and illuminates America’s changing cultural, religious, and political landscape. PRRI’s mission is to help journalists, scholars, pundits, thought leaders, clergy, and the general public better understand debates on public policy issues, and the important cultural and religious dynamics shaping American society and politics.

The chart shows that Orthodox Christians account for a mere half of 1% of the US population; in other words, about 1.66 million Americans out of a total population of 331,449,281. This gives an average of 33,200 Orthodox Christians per state. The actual numbers are likely lower: if similar surveys are any indication, this figure includes those not in communion with the Orthodox Church who nevertheless call themselves Orthodox. (See Sotiris Mitralexis’ Questions à Propos Pew Research Center’s Report on Orthodoxy.) The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America counts 1.5 million Orthodox Americans under its collective omophoria, distributed among multiple overlapping, unnamed “jurisdictions.” (The Bylaws define the Assembly’s membership as comprised of “all active Orthodox Bishops in the United States of America who are in canonical communion with all the local Autocephalous Orthodox Christian Churches.”) All but one—the Orthodox Church in America—have ethnic qualifiers before the word Orthodox in their names: Albanian, Antiochian, Bulgarian, Carpatho-Russian (aka Rusyn), Georgian, Greek, Romanian, Russian (in principle, since their departure from the Assembly to protest the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine), Serbian, Ukrainian, etc.

The Meaning of Idealism: The Metaphysics of Genus and Countenance
Pavel Florensky (Boris Jakim, Translator and Editor)
Brooklyn NY: Semantron Press, 2020

The Meaning of Idealism marks the latest testimony to Father Pavel Florensky’s (1882-1937) illimitable intellect to be translated by Boris Jakim. It comprises a series of course lectures on the topic of Platonism at the Moscow Theological Academy (which Jakim, for some reason, calls the Moscow Religious Academy [p.2]), originally published in 1915 when Florensky was 33 years old and four years a priest and father of his first child. In 1908, at age 26, he had been offered a teaching position in the Academy’s Chair of the History of Philosophy immediately upon graduating, but before the completion of his thesis. In September of that year, he delivered his maiden lecture, “The Universal Human Roots of Idealism,” and was thereupon appointed to teach a course entitled Introduction to the History of Ancient Philosophy. The lectures contained in the present volume were delivered several years into his teaching career and just months before his publication date, as his sources date as late as October 1914.

A word about the translator: Florensky studies in the English language would not exist without Boris Jakim. In 1997 he bequeathed Father Pavel Florensky’s magnum opus—The Pillar and Ground of the Truth—to the English-speaking world. This was followed twenty years later by Pavel Florensky: Early Religious Writings 1903-1909. I was delighted to learn of the release of The Meaning of Idealism so soon after Early Religious Writings. In the interim, the indefatigable Jakim went on to translate most of Father Sergius Bulgakov’s major theological works. Jakim never fails to impress with his apparent ease in translating some of the most abstruse texts and complex ideas to come out of Russian religious philosophy. This makes each of his translations as much his own masterpiece as that of the original author.

At 12:30 p.m. (GMT-4) on Tuesday, July 20, Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s founding editor Giacomo Sanfilippo will be interviewed live by Nathan Ormond of Digital Gnosis. You may click here to set a reminder for yourself. They look forward to a broad-ranging conversation on the theme of sexual and gender diversity, Orthodox theology, and pastoral praxis. Questions may be submitted via chat during a brief Q&A session at the end.

A slightly revised version of this essay appeared in the Spring/Summer 2021 edition of Jacob’s Well with the title “The Church as a Living Organism.” Orthodoxy in Dialogue reprints it with the author’s and the editor’s permission.

We often encounter situations that raise the question of where Orthodoxy draws its borders—how it defines what’s in and what’s out. These situations include questions about how to respond to non-Orthodox visitors to church who eagerly approach the chalice, fellow parishioners who spotlight their political views in coffee-hour conversation, or the priest whose academic work broaches topics that, were they discussed in Sunday school, would scandalize. Raised to their ultimate level, these questions impinge on our understanding of salvation itself. “Who is in the Church and who is out?” “Who will be saved?”

The conversation and controversy sparked by David Bentley Hart’s recent book, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, indicates how near to the surface such questions reside for us. While I cannot, in this article, answer the question of where such borders need to be drawn, or enter into dialogue with Dr. Hart, I will attempt to say something about the spirit of our border drawing—some principles I believe should inform our perspective when, inevitably, we must draw them. I will also offer an image I find useful when thinking about how a tradition such as Orthodoxy can interact with the surrounding world while maintaining its essential identity.