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Twentieth-Century Orthodox Reception Of Aquinas, Marcus Plested

Theology Faculty Research and Publications

The reception of Aquinas in the twentieth century must be understood in the context of the experience of political instability, exile, and Communist oppression that affected, in one way or another, virtually all the theology of the period. In this century, the anti-Westernism of the Russian Slavophiles reaches something of a peak, with Aquinas routinely held up as an archetypal representative of a theological tradition quite foreign to that of the Orthodox Church. That said, there are a number of examples of a more nuanced and less polemical approach to Aquinas that serve to provide hope for a less confrontational …