For students of the interaction of state building, nation building, and religion, Ukraine constitutes one of the most important case studies at the dawn of the twenty-first century. With more than forty-eight million inhabitants, Ukraine is the second most populous state to emerge from the break-up of the former Soviet Bloc. Ukraine contains one of the largest Orthodox communities in the world. Alongside the millions of Orthodox faithful are more than three thousand Ukrainian Greek Catholic parishes, which constitute the largest Eastern Christian church in the world united with Rome.
Much of the analysis presented in the essays that make up this book deals with the responses of Ukraine’s Eastern Christians to the challenge of the national idea. The book places the history and current status of Ukraine’s Orthodox and Greek Catholic communities into the context of the modern Ukrainian national revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the resurgence of Ukrainian national consciousness in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
