One of the common charges against the participants in the protests which began in Minneapolis[1] and spread virally around the country, and which frequently included the defacing and toppling of public statuary, is that the protesters are engaged in a new wave of iconoclasm[2]. Coming from political and cultural conservatives, these arguments claim that the protests are imbued with a new and dangerous religious impulse[3]. Now for Orthodox Christians, who follow the canons of the Seventh Ecumenical Council and venerate the great Orthodox iconophile, Saint John of Damascus, this charge of iconoclasm is grave, and should be investigated in earnest.
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Society
V. S. Soloviev and the Russian Roots of Personalism
Personalist philosophy is generally understood to have emerged in the middle of the last century. But an earlier antecedent of this important school of thought has been overlooked.
by Dylan Pahman
While the importance of thinkers such as N. Berdyaev, S. L. Frank, and other Russian émigrés to the development of twentieth-century personalist philosophy is widely acknowledged,1 one major influence on their respective religious philosophies is often overlooked in discussions of their contributions to personalism: the nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox philosopher Vladimir Soloviev.2 While Soloviev does not speak of himself as a personalist, several essential aspects of what came to be called personalism can be found in his thought: viz. the inviolable dignity of the human (more…)