Conversion After Socialism
Conversion After Socialism

Author: Mathijs Pelkmans

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9781845456177

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"The large and sudden influx of missionaries into the former Soviet Union after seventy years of militant secularism has been controversial, and the widespread occurrence of conversion has led to anxiety about social and national disintegration. Although these concerns have been vigorously discussed in national arenas, social scientists have remained remarkably silent about the subject. This volume's focus on conversion offers a novel approach to the dislocations of the postsocialist experience. In eight well-researched ethnographic accounts the authors analyse a range of missionary encounters as well as aspects of conversion and 'anti-conversion' in different parts of the region, thus challenging the problematic idea that religious life after socialism involved a simple 'revival' of repressed religious traditions. Instead, they unravel the unexpected twists and turns of religious dynamics, and the processes that have challenged popular ideas about religion and culture. The contributions show how conversion is rooted in the disruptive qualities of the new 'capitalist experience' and document its unsettling effects on the individual and social level." --Book Jacket.

Communities of the Converted
Communities of the Converted

Author: Catherine Wanner

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-05-02

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0801461901

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After decades of official atheism, a religious renaissance swept through much of the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980s. The Calvinist-like austerity and fundamentalist ethos that had evolved among sequestered and frequently persecuted Soviet evangelicals gave way to a charismatic embrace of ecstatic experience, replete with a belief in faith healing. Catherine Wanner's historically informed ethnography, the first book on evangelism in the former Soviet Union, shows how once-marginal Ukrainian evangelical communities are now thriving and growing in social and political prominence. Many Soviet evangelicals relocated to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, expanding the spectrum of evangelicalism in the United States and altering religious life in Ukraine. Migration has created new transnational evangelical communities that are now asserting a new public role for religion in the resolution of numerous social problems. Hundreds of American evangelical missionaries have engaged in "church planting" in Ukraine, which is today home to some of the most active and robust evangelical communities in all of Europe. Thanks to massive assistance from the West, Ukraine has become a hub for clerical and missionary training in Eurasia. Many Ukrainians travel as missionaries to Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union. In revealing the phenomenal transformation of religious life in a land once thought to be militantly godless, Wanner shows how formerly socialist countries experience evangelical revival. Communities of the Converted engages issues of migration, morality, secularization, and global evangelism, while highlighting how they have been shaped by socialism. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. The open access edition is available at Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Ritual Revitalisation After Socialism
Ritual Revitalisation After Socialism

Author: László Fosztó

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 3643101759

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Although postsocialist Romania ranks as one of the most religious countries in Europe, the role of religion in public life is relatively little understood. This book investigates a village in Transylvania populated by members of two minority groups, Hungarians and Roma. Religion and ritual provide important resources for individuals and communities seeking to assert themselves publicly. The need for public affirmation among minorities is acute, but the forms of ritual they adopt differ. Some groups are more receptive to the revival of communal rituals and "traditions", whereas for others revitalisation seems to be more effective when it is individually focused through conversion to Pentecostalism. The book demonstrates that, even within a small community, different segments may opt for divergent forms of religious and cultural revival. Whereas Calvinism relies on the affirmation of cultural values to mobilise the faithful, Pentecostalism advocates a new form of moral personhood which is particularly attractive to Roma.

Becoming East German
Becoming East German

Author: Mary Fulbrook

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2013-09-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0857459759

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For roughly the first decade after the demise of the GDR, professional and popular interpretations of East German history concentrated primarily on forms of power and repression, as well as on dissent and resistance to communist rule. Socio-cultural approaches have increasingly shown that a single-minded emphasis on repression and coercion fails to address a number of important historical issues, including those related to the subjective experiences of those who lived under communist regimes. With that in mind, the essays in this volume explore significant physical and psychological aspects of life in the GDR, such as health and diet, leisure and dining, memories of the Nazi past, as well as identity, sports, and experiences of everyday humiliation. Situating the GDR within a broader historical context, they open up new ways of interpreting life behind the Iron Curtain – while providing a devastating critique of misleading mainstream scholarship, which continues to portray the GDR in the restrictive terms of totalitarian theory.

Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany
Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany

Author: David M. Luebke

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012-05-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0857453769

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The Protestant and Catholic Reformations thrust the nature of conversion into the center of debate and politicking over religion as authorities and subjects imbued religious confession with novel meanings during the early modern era. The volume offers insights into the historicity of the very concept of “conversion.” One widely accepted modern notion of the phenomenon simply expresses denominational change. Yet this concept had no bearing at the outset of the Reformation. Instead, a variety of processes, such as the consolidation of territories along confessional lines, attempts to ensure civic concord, and diplomatic quarrels helped to usher in new ideas about the nature of religious boundaries and, therefore, conversion. However conceptualized, religious change— conversion—had deep social and political implications for early modern German states and societies.

Time for Socialism
Time for Socialism

Author: Thomas Piketty

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2021-10-26

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 0300263333

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A chronicle of recent events that have shaken the world, from the author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century “What makes this manifesto noteworthy is that it comes from . . . an economist who gained his reputation as a researcher with vaguely left-of-center sensibilities but was far from a radical. Yet the times are such . . . that even honest moderates are driven to radical remedies.”—Robert Kuttner, New York Times As a correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde, world-renowned economist Thomas Piketty has documented the rise and fall of Trump, the drama of Brexit, Emmanuel Macron’s ascendance to the French presidency, the unfolding of a global pandemic, and much else besides, always from the perspective of his fight for a more equitable world. This collection brings together those articles and is prefaced by an extended introductory essay, in which Piketty argues that the time has come to support an inclusive and expansive conception of socialism as a counterweight against the hypercapitalism that defines our current economic ideology. These essays offer a first draft of history from one of the world’s leading economists and public figures, detailing the struggle against inequalities and tax evasion, in favor of a federalist Europe and a globalization more respectful of work and the environment.

God's Double Agent
God's Double Agent

Author: Bob Fu

Publisher: Baker Books

Published: 2013-10-01

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1441244662

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Tens of millions of Christians live in China today, many of them leading double lives or in hiding from a government that relentlessly persecutes them. Bob Fu, whom the Wall Street Journal called "The pastor of China's underground railroad," is fighting to protect his fellow believers from persecution, imprisonment, and even death. God's Double Agent is his fascinating and riveting story. Bob Fu is indeed God's double agent. By day Fu worked as a full-time lecturer in a communist school; by night he pastored a house church and led an underground Bible school. This can't-put-it-down book chronicles Fu's conversion to Christianity, his arrest and imprisonment for starting an illegal house church, his harrowing escape, and his subsequent rise to prominence in the United States as an advocate for his brethren. God's Double Agent will inspire readers even as it challenges them to boldly proclaim and live out their faith in a world that is at times indifferent, and at other times murderously hostile, to those who spread the gospel.

The Post-Socialist City
The Post-Socialist City

Author: Kiril Stanilov

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2007-08-13

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 140206053X

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This book focuses on the spatial transformations in the most dynamically evolving urban areas of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. It links the restructuring of the built environment with the underlying processes and the forces of socio-economic reforms. The detailed accounts of the spatial transformations in a key moment of urban history in the region enhance our understanding of the linkages between society and space.

How China Became Capitalist
How China Became Capitalist

Author: R. Coase

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-30

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1137019379

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How China Became Capitalist details the extraordinary, and often unanticipated, journey that China has taken over the past thirty five years in transforming itself from a closed agrarian socialist economy to an indomitable economic force in the international arena. The authors revitalise the debate around the rise of the Chinese economy through the use of primary sources, persuasively arguing that the reforms implemented by the Chinese leaders did not represent a concerted attempt to create a capitalist economy, and that it was 'marginal revolutions' that introduced the market and entrepreneurship back to China. Lessons from the West were guided by the traditional Chinese principle of 'seeking truth from facts'. By turning to capitalism, China re-embraced her own cultural roots. How China Became Capitalist challenges received wisdom about the future of the Chinese economy, warning that while China has enormous potential for further growth, the future is clouded by the government's monopoly of ideas and power. Coase and Wang argue that the development of a market for ideas which has a long and revered tradition in China would be integral in bringing about the Chinese dream of social harmony.