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The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Rus, has correctly been seen as a staunch supporter of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. However, explicit statements of support for the war are rare in his public sermons and speeches, and it is worth exploring the mechanisms of his support in some detail. The article presents an analysis of all the patriarch's sermons and speeches between February 2022 and February 2023 and shows how the patriarch uses references to history to nurture a worldview that makes the war both legitimate and necessary. Using Duncan Bell's notion of a mythscape, the author argues that Kirill infuses secular history with divine meaning in order to give indirect divine legitimation for the war in Ukraine. He further relates this to Stoeckl's contention that the Russian Orthodox Church's promotion of so-called traditional values functions as civil religion for today's Russia and suggests that Kirill's use of history nurtures this civil religion further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El documento A Common Word Between Us and You (Una palabra común entre nosotros y vosotros) fue publicado por un gran grupo de líderes e intelectuales musulmanes en octubre de 2007. Centrándose en el doble mandamiento del amor a Dios y al prójimo, invitaba a los líderes cristianos a comprometerse en un diálogo. Muchos líderes eclesiásticos aceptaron con entusiasmo la invitación y durante los años siguientes la iniciativa musulmana dio sus frutos: numerosas conferencias islamo-cristianas y proyectos de cooperación en todo el mundo, con la implicación de una gran gama de cristianos, desde ortodoxos hasta evangélicos. Ha inspirado la cooperación interreligiosa más allá del eje islamo-cristiano y puede seguir haciéndolo en años venideros. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The document A Common Word Between Us and You was published by a broad range of Muslim leaders and scholars in October 2007. Focussing on the twin commandment to love God and neighbour, it invited Christian leaders to engage in dialogue. Many Church leaders eagerly embraced the invitation, and in the subsequent years, the Muslim initiative bore fruits in the form of numerous Muslim-Christian conferences and cooperative projects across the world involving a broad range of Christians from Orthodox to Evangelicals. It has inspired interreligious cooperation beyond the Muslim-Christian axis and can continue to do so in the years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay suggests that speech act theory can provide tools to understand better how interreligious dialogue works and how words and actions are intimately connected. Following a brief introduction of speech act theory as developed by John Austin and others, with the key terminology of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, it applies this in an analysis of three examples taken from key texts of the Common Word dialogue process. This process consists of an exchange of letters and a series of conferences between senior Muslim and Christian leaders that started in 2007 with the Muslim open letter, A Common Word between Us and You. First, the essay looks at the illocutionary force of the publication in The New York Times of a response from Christian leaders produced at Yale University and suggests that it was highly significant in giving importance to A Common Word. The second example is a comparison of the opening greetings of three documents that brings to light very different illocutionary acts that incidentally also characterize the three texts. The third example is concerned with A Common Word's treatment of shirk. Speech act analysis of central texts shows how different readers may construe the same utterance as very different illocutionary acts. The essay suggests that what is at work in A Common Word is a manipulation of conventions determining speech acts, eventually suggesting that the focus on acts may be a springboard for further analysis of the potential for action by the actors involved in dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]