Kostyuk K. N. Istoriya sotsial'no-eticheskoi mysli v Russkoy pravoslavnoi tserkvi [History of social and ethical thought in the Russian Orthodox Church]. Saint Petersburg: Aleteya Publ., 2013, 448 p. Konstantin Kostyuk began writing about social and political thought in Russian Orthodoxy, as well as the social teachings of other Christian denominations, as early as in the late 1990s, page 269 and he was one of the few authors who responded vividly to the appearance of the document "Fundamentals of the social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church"in 2009. In 2002, he defended at the Catholic University in Eichstedt (Germany) a large dissertation in German "The concept of the political in the Russian Orthodox tradition. The relationship between Church, State and Society in Russia"8. And finally, the Russian reader has the opportunity to get acquainted with the results of the research conducted by K. Kostyuk, next to which today it is hardly possible to put anything of equal value. The first thing that comes to mind as a comparison after reading the book is, of course, G. Florovsky's "Ways of Russian Theology" (whose work, by the way, the author quotes from time to time). In the case of K. Kostiuk, we encounter the same large-scale, but even broader, historical coverage of Russian religious thought. But the difference is also obvious. It manifests itself not only in the fact that in this case we are dealing with a very balanced, detached analytical approach, free from the emphasized sharpness and subjectivity in assessments that are characteristic of Florovsky's famous work. The main thing is the subject of research itself. Kostyuk set himself the task of extracting from the same tradition and history of ideas precisely the "socio-ethical" dimension - something that "is rarely thematized in the history of Orthodox thought, and almost never comes to the surface as an independent phenomenon" (p. 1). There is also an objective reason for this, since, as the author remind ... Read more