Restricting Religious Names: Three Recent Cases

Dmytro Vovk is a visiting associate professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

The name of a religious group is usually considered an aspect of its autonomy. The name can be based on religious history and theology and serve as the group’s self-representation to its members, the public, and the state. Other posts in this blog series discuss how, from the perspective of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB), a religiously neutral state can interfere in naming for non-religious reasons, such as protection of intellectual rights, prohibition of morally inappropriate or pejorative names, or prior use of the names by other religious organizations. These restrictions apply similarly to religious organizations and to NGOs, political parties, and even business corporations alike.

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The Russian Orthodox Church and Inner-Orthodox Relations

Thomas Bremer is a Roman Catholic theologian and professor emeritus of the University of Münster.

Even before the Russian aggression against Ukraine, world Orthodoxy was in a crisis that made its normal functioning impossible. The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) refused the autocephaly that the Ecumenical Patriarchate (EP) had granted to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in early 2019, and the ROC eventually broke communion with the EP and three more (out of some fifteen) Orthodox Churches.

The ROC resisted the autocephaly of the OCU for four interconnected reasons, all diametrically opposed to the position of the EP:

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The Great Inventor: In Memoriam Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon

Andrey Shishkov is a research fellow at the School of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Tartu (Estonia) and a member of the “Orthodoxy as Solidarity” research projects supported by the Estonian Research Council. 

On 2 February 2023, John Zizioulas, Orthodox hierarch of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and one of the most influential theologians of the past 50 years, passed away at age 92. He is known worldwide for his theology of communion, described in his two major works: Being as Communion (1985) and Communion and Otherness (2006). These books offer an attempt at a systematic theology that brings together various theological disciplines (such as triadology, Christology, ecclesiology, anthropology, pneumatology, and eschatology) based on the idea that being is communion. His opponents regarded him as a heretic and a modernist, while his supporters considered him one of the greatest minds of the Orthodox Church in history.

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