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Title: Contemporary History, Sort Of
Review: This book tries to give a bit of everything, but ends up doing nothing very well. First, the book is not very large, which is not a good sign when you are trying to cover two thousand years worth of history. The biggest section in the book discusses what is going on in the modern Orthodox world in the various Orthodox jurisdictions. Unfortunately, even this information is not very helpful as it was not especially accurate. The author's claims, for example, about the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia are exaggerated; the author essentially take the statements of a few firebrands within ROCOR and projects them onto the entire jurisdiction as though the statements are ROCOR's official position or dominant belief. Readers would be better served reading The Orthodox Church by Bp. Kallistos, or even Fr. Alexander Schmemann's The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy.
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