Regarding the Russian president's op-ed in the NYT: What good ol' Vlad does not realize: God is American. If he (Vlad) did, the Third Rome and the City Upon a Hill would get along just fine.
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Re the third Rome, note the following from Wikipedia: "The Orthodox faith was central to Byzantine notions of their identity and what distinguished them from 'barbarians.' Vladimir the Great had converted Kievan Rus' to Orthodoxy in 989, in return for which he became the first barbarian to ever get an Imperial princess as a wife." Image from
Re City City Upon a Hill: "The phrase entered the American lexicon early in its history, in the Puritan John Winthrop's 1630 sermon 'A Model of Christian Charity'. Still aboard the ship Arbella, Winthrop admonished the future Massachusetts Bay colonists that their new community would be a 'city upon a hill', watched by the world---which became the ideal the New England colonists placed upon their hilly capital city, Boston.[1]Winthrop's sermon gave rise to the widespread belief in American folklore that the United States of America is God's country because metaphorically it is a Shining City upon a Hill, an early example of American exceptionalism." Image from
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