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Between Heaven and Russia

Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia

By: Sarah Riccardi-Swartz

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Between Heaven and Russia

Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia

By: Sarah Riccardi-Swartz

How is religious conversion transforming American democracy? In one corner of Appalachia, a group of American citizens has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church and through it Putin’s New Russia. Historically a minority immigrant faith in the United States, Russian Orthodoxy is attracting Americans who look to Russian religion and politics for answers to western secularism and the loss of traditional family values in the face of accelerating progressivism. This ethnography highlights an intentional community of converts who are exemplary of much broader networks of Russian Orthodox converts in the US. These converts sought and found a conservatism more authentic than Christian American Republicanism and a nationalism unburdened by the broken promises of American exceptionalism. Ultimately, both converts and the Church that welcomes them deploy the subversive act of adopting the ideals and faith of a foreign power for larger, transnational political ends. Offering insights into this rarely considered religious world, including its far-right political roots that nourish the embrace of Putin’s Russia, this ethnography shows how religious conversion is tied to larger issues of social politics, allegiance, (anti)democracy, and citizenship. These conversions offer us a window onto both global politics and foreign affairs, while also allowing us to see how particular communities in the U.S. are grappling with social transformations in the twenty-first century. With broad implications for our understanding of both conservative Christianity and right-wing politics, as well as contemporary Russian-American relations, this book provides insight in the growing constellations of far-right conservatism. While Russian Orthodox converts are more likely to form the moral minority rather than the moral majority, they are an important gauge for understanding the powerful philosophical shifts occurring in the current political climate in the United States and what they might mean for the future of American values, ideals, and democracy.

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Page Count

288

Publisher

Fordham University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

082329952X

ISBN 13

9780823299522

Between Heaven and Russia

Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia

By: Sarah Riccardi-Swartz

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Between Heaven and Russia

Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia

By: Sarah Riccardi-Swartz

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288

Publisher

Orthodox Christianity and Cont

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823299503

ISBN 13

9780823299508

Sonic Icons

Relation, Recognition, and Revival in a Syriac World

By: Sarah Bakker Kellogg

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Sonic Icons

Relation, Recognition, and Revival in a Syriac World

By: Sarah Bakker Kellogg

A vivid, artfully crafted, and deeply hopeful account of one community’s struggle to rediscover and reinvent itself after a century of genocidal loss, dispossession, and displacement To the extent that Middle Eastern Christians register in Euro-American political imaginaries, they are usually invoked to justify Western military intervention into countries like Iraq or Syria, or as an exemption to anti-Islamic immigration policies because of an assumption that their Christianity makes them easily assimilable in the so-called “Judeo-Christian” West. Using the tools of multisensory ethnography, Sonic Icons uncovers how these views work against the very communities they are meant to benefit. Through long term fieldwork in the Netherlands among Syriac Orthodox Christians—also known as Assyrians, Aramaeans, and Syriacs—Bakker Kellogg reveals how they intertwine religious practice with political activism to save Syriac Christianity from the twin threats of political violence in the Middle East and cultural assimilation in Europe. In a historical moment when much of their tradition has been forgotten or destroyed, their story of self-discovery is one of survival and reinvention. By reviving the late antique Syriac liturgical tradition known as the Daughters and Sons of the Covenant, they seek a complex form of recognition for what they understand to be the ethical core of Christian kinship in an ethnic as well as in a religious sense, despite living in societies that do not recognize this unhyphenated form of ethnoreligiosity as a politically legitimate mode of public identity. Drawing on both theological and linguistic understandings of the icon, Sonic Icons rethinks foundational theoretical accounts of ethnicization, racialization, and secularization by examining how kinship gets made, claimed, and named in the global politics of minority recognition. The icon, as a site of communicative and reproductive power, illuminates how these processes are shaped by religious histories of struggle for sovereignty over the reproductive future.

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Page Count

307

Publisher

Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1531509150

ISBN 13

9781531509156