Orthodox Christianity and the Covid-19 Pandemic

The impact of the church’s response to a global pandemic was immense. Churches are the most trusted institutions in the cultural spaces dominated by Orthodox Christianity. A global pandemic, however, emerges as a novel type of challenge. The scale of inter-dependencies between religious and political actors reaches an unprecedented level with the proliferation of the coronavirus. However, churches choose to respond differently. The book examines how religious institutions, churchgoers, and individuals responded to the COVID-19 and socio-political changes brought by the global pandemic. It thus provides a substantive contribution to the sociology of religion and area studies literature, and it answers questions at the intersection of sociology and practical theology with regard to institutional and grassroots accounts of religiosity and religious practices under the global crisis. Each chapter reflect on both institutional and grassroots accounts around the three major topics in the framework of Orthodox churches’ responses to the global pandemic. Each contribution reflects on religious practices (e.g., rituals and their interpretations, the lived religion perspective); religious organizations and institutions (official rhetoric of churches over politics, changes to religious roles and status, new institutional challenges); and religion and science (including but not limited to the issue of medicine and vaccinations)