Book Review: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Immigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925–1940 by Antoine Arjakovsky

There is no denying the increasing interest in the theology of the Orthodox Church among Western Christians, particularly over the last twenty years or so. Even before then, in the 1980s, a significant number of evangelicals, most of whom had been involved in the ministries of Campus Crusade for Christ, were received into the Orthodox Church. (For this story, see Peter E. Gillquist, Becoming Orthodox: A Journey to the Ancient Christian Faith [Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1990]). Within the last few years, InterVarsity Press, a leading evangelical publisher, has published Andrew Louth’s Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology (2013) and his edited collection, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present (2015). A recent volume by one of the English-speaking world’s most productive theologians, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, is entitled Looking East in Winter: Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2021). Williams, who provided the foreword for the volume under review here, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Vladimir Lossky and has written books on both Sergei Bulgakov and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In fact, this renewed interest in Orthodoxy is not limited to theology but also involves spiritual practice. Even evangelical Reformed pastors are recommending the Jesus Prayer—which would have been nearly unthinkable when I was ordained in the late 1980s! Arjakovsky’s massive volume will, therefore, be a welcome addition, at least to the scholars who are participating in this phenomenon. I must say at the outset, however, that this is not an easy volume to read. Not only is it very long and very thorough; the author himself says that he “favored a rather meandering account” (531). The book began as a doctoral dissertation, Book Review