From 16 to 18 June 2025, Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus in New York hosted the regular — already traditional — Solon and Marianna Patterson Triennial Conference. This conference, organised by the Orthodox Christian Studies Center, featured presentations by representatives of the academic community from universities in the United States, as well as the United Kingdom, Greece and Sweden.
Three plenary presentations set the tone for the discussion. In her introductory presentation, “Religion, Nostalgia, and Nationalism”, Cathleen Kaveny provided an in-depth analysis of how nostalgia for an idealised past becomes a driving force behind religious nationalism. She emphasised that when religion becomes a means of restoring “lost greatness”, it loses its eschatological horizon and is replaced by political, ideological, and cultural surrogates.
Panteli Kalaitzidis presented a deeply prophetic vision in his paper, “For the place on which you are standing is holy ground”: Christian identity, national identity and the claims of territorial exclusiveness. An Essay on Christian delocalization”. He examined the tension between Christian identity, which is transnational and eschatological in nature, and territorial claims to “holy land”, which often cause conflicts. His call for the “decolonisation of territorial theology” deserves special attention.
Dimitrios Moschos focused his attention on the historical example of Greece in the 18th–19th centuries. He showed how the national movement not only borrowed symbols from Orthodox theology, but also gradually transformed the very consciousness of the church, replacing eschatological expectations with the idea of an earthly “Christian kingdom” capable to expel the Turks from Greek lands. He traced how ethnic nationalism, supported by the ideas of Greek romanticism and state-building impulses, became a kind of substitute for theological thinking about the end times, transforming the nation into a “sacred subject” of history.
More information about this conferenc can be found in a detailed analysis in Ukrainian on our website –
www.academic-initiative.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/religiynyi_natsionalism.pdf
