St. Andrew's in 2022

The two pandemic years were an extreme challenge for us. So we thought. Needless to say that 2022 turned out to be even worse. Sometimes we were almost desperate. However we continued our most important projects with an emphasis on ecumenical dialogue and civil society, published new books and organized two sessions of our Summer Institutes. 

Summer Theological Institutes

We continued our highly successful Summer Theological Institute (STI). Its first planned session in January (as a continuation of the last year STI) has been cancelled due to the last wave of the pandemic, so we had two sessions of the 21st STI in Moscow from 27 June to 9 July (one group included those who had theological education and another included students of secular universities). These were vibrant meetings with very intensive studies and active communication between students and teachers. About 30 students came from all over Russia and represented all major confessions. Many of them were established specialists in their fields. Teachers were St. Andrew’s best professors. As a continuation of the STI we organized a series of seminars in Christianity in the modern world.

Interconfessional and International Cooperation

We held two important international conferences: Spirituality in a Digital Society on 27-30 September in Bose, Italy (jointly with the Monastery of Bose) and Spirit, Digit, Society on 12-13 December in Moscow (jointly with Pokrovskie Vorota Cultural Centre). It was a combination of physical presence and Zoom – it worked very well!

We also hosted two local conferences targeting a wider audience: Food, Hospitality and Communication: Feast Images in Theology, Philosophy and Culture, 12th Symposium in Memory of Natalia Trauberg on 9 April and 27th St. Andrew’s Readings on Contemporary Theological Issues on 11 December.

St. Andrew’s rector and other faculty members participated in several international events including a meeting of CEC Thematic Group on Science, Technologies, and Christian Ethics (Strasbourg, 3-5 April), meetings of the Board of the European Christian Convention (Stuttgart, 25-26 May; Karlsruhe, 28-30 August), Journées d’Arras annual conference (on Muslim-Christian dialogue, Rome, 7-11 June), the European Academy of Religion (Bologna, 20-23 June), an ecumenical conference St. Isaac of Nineveh and His Spiritual Teaching (Bose, Italy, 6-9 September) and Oikosnet-Europe annual conference (Malaga, 5-9 October).

Publishing Program

St. Andrew’s is a recognized leader in academic theological publishing in Russian and our books are in demand at Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant seminaries, university theology departments and, most important, in the secular market. In 2022 we published and reprinted 13 volumes including:

• The Early Church and Judeochristianity. (History of Early Christianity, Vol 2) by Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer
• The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics, v. II/2: Laity Styles by Hans Urs von Balthasar
• Brother Roger of Taizé. “Having almost nothing...” by Sabine Laplane
• Personality in a Post-Religious Society by Alexei Bodrov and Mikhail Tolstoluzhenko, Eds.
• Christianity and World Culture: Literature, Music, Philosophy by Iannuary Ivliev
• Who is a Human Being? Theological Anthropology Ecumenically by Ivana Noble, Zdenko Širka et al
• And the Earth Brought Forth: Christian Faith and Evolution by Gijsbert van den Brink

Our participation in the Frankfurt Book Fair helps us to develop cooperation with leading publishers worldwide. And we maintain our special book distribution projects to theological, university and regional libraries and to theological graduates – though at a very reduced scale this year.