At no point in the past 80 years has the threat to a liberal democratic order in Europe and the Americas been under such strain. We are all familiar with Vladimir Putin’s role at the axis of efforts to disrupt these norms. But the importance of a distinctive brand of Russian Orthodoxy, spearheaded by Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, in providing the ideological scaffolding for a militant strain of Christian nationalism has largely escaped attention. Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, assistant professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University and author of "Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia" (Fordham University Press, 2022) will shine a light on Russian Orthodoxy’s growing influence upon the political imagination in not only Eastern Europe, but here in the United States.