Bohdan Bociurkiw Memorial Lecture | Jose Casanova | The Three Kyivan Churches of Ukraine and the Three Romes

Following the canonical legitimation of the newly constituted Orthodox Church of Ukraine in January 2019, there are now three competing “national” churches in the country whose ecclesiastical roots extend back to the ancient Kyiv metropoly—with divergent transnational allegiances to the Pope (First Rome), the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (Second Rome), and the Moscow Patriarchate (Third Rome). The lecture will analyze some of the consequences for church-state, nation, and civil society relations, for potential consolidation of a pattern of religious denominational pluralism, and for ongoing ecumenical and geopolitical relations between the three Romes.

José Casanova is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and an emeritus professor of sociology and of theology and religious studies at Georgetown University. His book Public Religions in the Modern World (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994) has become a modern classic and has been translated into many European and non-European languages. Among his recent publications are Global Religious and Secular Dynamics (Brill, 2019) and two collections of essays in Ukrainian, Po toi bik sekuliaryzatsiї (Beyond Secularization; Dukh i Litera, 2017) and Relihiia v suchasnomu sviti (Religion in the Contemporary World; Ukrainian Catholic Univ. Press, 2019).