2.5 stars rounded up.

The first third of the book was good. It was a very brief history of how the Orthodox churches came to be. It is in many ways a mix of Church history with that of Byzantine and other Eastern European nations.

The remainder of the book reads like a series of blog posts relating to the Russian/Ukrainian conflict from a religious perspective. The author has a very serious pro Greek Orthodox anti-Russian Orthodox and this slant comes through with every blog post turned book chapter. There is some interest since the conflict is still new and ongoing, but even the little (and incredibly niche) interest these articles might have will almost certainly be incredibly dated as (God willing) this war becomes something we see only through the rear view mirror.

When I discuss these topics on my blog and recommend bibliography, the very first question unanimously posed by all my readers is, "Is it a reliable text? Impartial? Or is it politically aligned to the point of being biased?" Here's the thing: as much as I overall liked this book (and as much as I tend to agree with many of the author's theses), I'm not so convinced that, in recommending it, I could answer 'yes' to the aforementioned questions. In fact, it's not impartial; it's so blatantly and politically aligned that it somewhat shoots itself in the foot because just scrolling through the index raises doubts that the author might be cherry-picking to support her views.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think she's doing that (i.e., she says true things), but titles like "What's so scary about the inclusion of God in the Russian constitution?" or "Holy Father, you're not helping" don't help much in giving the essay an air of impartiality, which, in my opinion, would be useful for it not to seem like just a thesis pamphlet.

Very interesting (and certainly a strong point) is the dedication of an entire section to how the interplay between politics and religion in Russia is, or could influence, other areas of the world much farther away than Ukraine (USA, Korea, Macedonia among many), an aspect that I haven't frequently seen mentioned in other books on the topic.

A bit limiting is the author's decision to write parts of her book almost as if it were a day-to-day commentary on the Russia-Ukraine war. I don't know the genesis of the volume, but at times, it seemed like I was reading geopolitics blog posts from the first half of 2022 that were updated day by day based on news events. It's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you; after all, we're talking about an instant book. But I don't think we'll still find it on the shelves of bookstores in twenty years.