E. E. Golubinsky, one of the most prominent natives of the Kostroma land, the largest historian of the Russian Orthodox Church, the first of the professors of the Moscow Theological Academy, elected as an ordinary academician of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Through the prism of the milestones of the historian’s biography, the article examines the general trends in the socio-cultural development of Russia in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries The specific features in the culture of everyday life of the Orthodox clergy are analyzed, the problem field of church educational institutions is structured, the portrait characteristic of the theological and academic corporation is personalized, its role in the historical and cultural development of Russian society is revealed. The amazing fate of E. E. Golubinsky, his intellectual honesty, commitment to the religious, moral and institutional reorganization of the historical church are updated in the context of contemporary problems of Russian education and society as a whole. The problematic connotations in the development of theological and academic corporations are revealed — the lack of a single intellectual and spiritual space in their coexistence, a certain disconnectedness of their position in the socio-cultural development of society, the need to deepen their interaction with representatives of secular intelligentsia. The necessary consequence of the synergy of scientific knowledge and spiritual faith is the construction of the Orthodox philosophy of history, which in the context of the crisis that is being experienced today, essential discourse is of practical importance in the inevitability of dialogue and the inevitability of creative transformation of personality in the modern world.