Alban and Sergius: The Story of a Journal

In the last century the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius gave to Russian Orthodoxy an opportunity to speak with a voice never head as powerfully before in the western world, in a sustained encounter with the Christian West, and from the date of its foundation in 1928 the Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, later Sobornost, sought to strike a good balance between Western and Eastern contributions to Christian thought. It provided an ecumenical encounter principally between the exiled Orthodox intelligentsia of the Russian diaspora and the Catholic party of the Church of England, but also on occasion with Presbyterians, Methodists and other Protestants.

In this fascinating account of the work and mission of Sobornost, Aidan Nichols shows how this was to change significantly as the Western tradition began to be seen as taking too many wrong turnings to be a reliable guide for Christian theology at large, and he divides this study into two parts – the first forty years of the journal as a time of encounter more or less on equal terms, and the last fifty years where the meeting of East and West would be increasingly on the East’s terms—and, in another striking development, this meant the Greek East rather than the Russian.