title: Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age
author: Christos Yannaras
description: "Christos Yannaras is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens. Born in Athens in 1935, he studied at the Universities of Athens, Thessalonica, Bonn and Paris. He holds doctorates in philosophy from the Sorbonne and in theology from Thessalonica. The author of more than twenty books, he has been translated into a number of languages."
zlib_text: GREEK ORTHODOX THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
  48:1-4 2003 
  A RESPONSE TO FR. STANLEY S. HARAKAS' "ECCLESIAL AND ETHNIC 
  IDENTITIES WITHIN THE AMERICAN RELIGIOUS SCENE" 
  ROBERT M. HADDAD 
  Because my disagreement with Fr. Harakas relates more to emphasis than 
  to substance, I shall pursue "response" less as antithesis than as commen-
  tary but not without intruding, particularly in my concluding remarks, some 
  of my own thoughts on ecclesial and ethnic identities. 
  In the space allotted I cannot hope to do justice to the richness of Fr. 
  Harakas* effort to relate shifting ethnic and linguistic identities to an Or-
  thodox identity that vastly transcends both sets of distinctions. His 
  exposition, although a model of clarity, displays a tolerance of ethnic and 
  linguistic, not to mention jurisdictional, diversity that far exceeds mine. 
  Fr. Harakas begins by clarifying two major theories of the genesis of 
  ethnicity: primordialism, which holds ethnicity to be a given; and 
  constructivism, which sees e