Inochentism and Orthodox Christianity
Inochentism and Orthodox Christianity

Author: James A. Kapaló

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-05

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1317116259

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This book explores the history and evolution of Inochentism, a controversial new religious movement that emerged in the Russian and Romanian borderlands of what is now Moldova and Ukraine in the context of the Russian revolutionary period. Inochentism centres around the charismatic preaching of Inochentie, a monk of the Orthodox Church, who inspired an apocalyptic movement that was soon labelled heretical by the Orthodox Church and persecuted as socially and politically subversive by Soviet and Romanian state authorities. Inochentism and Orthodox Christianity charts the emergence and development of Inochentism through the twentieth century based on hagiographies, oral testimonies, press reports, state legislation and a wealth of previously unstudied police and secret police archival material. Focusing on the role that religious persecution and social marginalization played in the transformation of this understudied and much vilified group, the author explores a series of counter-narratives that challenge the mainstream historiography of the movement and highlight the significance of the concept of ‘liminality’ in relation to the study of new religious movements and Orthodoxy. This book constitutes a systematic historical study of an Eastern European ‘home-grown’ religious movement taking a ‘grass-roots’ approach to the problem of minority religious identities in twentieth century Eastern Europe. Consequently, it will be of great interest to scholars of new religions movements, religious history and Russian and Eastern European studies.

Women and Religiosity in Orthodox Christianity
Women and Religiosity in Orthodox Christianity

Author: Ina Merdjanova

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2021-11-02

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0823298639

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Women and Religiosity in Orthodox Christianity fills a significant gap in the sociology of religious practice: Studies focused on women’s religiosity have overlooked Orthodox populations, while studies of Orthodox practice (operating within the dominant theological, historical, and sociological framework) have remained gender-blind. The essays in this collection shed new light on the women who make up a considerable majority of the Orthodox population by engaging women’s lifeworlds, practices, and experiences in relation to their religion in multiple, varied localities, discussing both contemporary and pre-1989 developments. These contributions critically engage the pluralist and changing character of Orthodox institutional and social life by using feminist epistemologies and drawing on original ethnographic research to account for Orthodox women’s previously ignored perspectives, knowledges, and experiences. Combining the depth of ethnographic analysis with geographical breadth and employing a variety of research methodologies, this book expands our understanding of Orthodox Christianity by examining Orthodox women of diverse backgrounds in different settings: parishes, monasteries, and the secular spaces of everyday life, and under shifting historical conditions and political regimes. In defiance of claims that Orthodox Christianity is immutable and fixed in time, these essays argue that continuity and transformation can be found harmoniously in social practices, demographic trends, and larger material contexts at the intersection between gender, Orthodoxy, and locality. Contributors: Kristin Aune, Milica Bakić-Hayden, Maria Bucur, Ketevan Gurchiani, James Kapaló, Helena Kupari, Ina Merdjanova, Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, Eleni Sotiriou, Tatiana Tiaynen-Qadir, Detelina Tocheva

Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania
Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania

Author: Roland Clark

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1350100978

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The Romanian Orthodox Church expanded significantly after the First World War, yet Protestant Repenter and schismatic Orthodox movements such as Old Calendarism also grew exponentially during this period, terrifying church leaders who responded by sending missionary priests into the villages to combat sectarianism. Several lay renewal movements such as the Lord's Army and the Stork's Nest also appeared within the Orthodox Church, implicating large numbers of peasants and workers in tight-knit religious communities operating at the margins of Eastern Orthodoxy. Bringing the history of the Orthodox Church into dialogue with sectarianism, heresy, grassroots religious organization and nation-building, Roland Clark explores how competing religious groups in interwar Romania responded to and emerged out of similar catalysts, including rising literacy rates, new religious practices and a newly empowered laity inspired by universal male suffrage and a growing civil society who took control of community organizing. He also analyses how Orthodox leaders used nationalism to attack sectarians as 'un-Romanian', whilst these groups remained indifferent to the claims the nation made on their souls. Situated at the intersection of transnational history, religious history and the history of reading, Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania challenges us to rethink the one-sided narratives about modernity and religious conflict in interwar Eastern Europe. The ebook editions are available under a CC BY-NC 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Liverpool.

Romania, 1916–1941
Romania, 1916–1941

Author: Dennis Deletant

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-08-19

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1000643816

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This study challenges the rose-tinted view of the interwar period in Romanian history, which is often judged against the darkness of almost five decades of Communist rule. Romania, like several of the states of Eastern Europe, emerged from the First World War as it had entered it, as a predominantly agricultural country, and one of its major problems was the condition of the peasantry. This volume’s focus is the drive to improve that condition, on the collapse of democracy, and the search by Romania’s leaders for strategies to secure the state, to assert the country’s independence, and to maintain its territorial integrity in the face of the threat to the European order posed by two totalitarian systems, represented by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By examining recent scholarship, this volume provides the most up-to-date account of Romania’s predicament in the interwar years. Romania, 1916–1941 is a useful resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in foreign policy, politics, society, internationalization and late development in interwar Central and Eastern Europe.

Interwar East Central Europe, 1918-1941
Interwar East Central Europe, 1918-1941

Author: Sabrina Ramet

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-07

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0429648707

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This monograph focuses on the challenges that interwar regimes faced and how they coped with them in the aftermath of World War One, focusing especially on the failure to establish and stabilize democratic regimes, as well as on the fate of ethnic and religious minorities. Topics explored include the political systems and how they changed during the two decades under review, land reform, Church–state relations, and culture. Countries studied include Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. "Sabrina Ramet has assembled a team of highly respectable country specialists to offer a fresh and historiographically updated reading of interwar developments in East Central Europe. The volume is bookended by two excellent comparative and theoretically informed essays carefully weighing the multiplicity of factors contributing to the instability of the interwar regimes. As a result this survey succeeds admirably in producing a nuanced narrative and analysis." - Maria Todorova, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Sabrina Ramet, together with a roster of other eminent scholars, has produced an exciting new history of interwar East Central Europe. The volume has a clear focus on the failure of democracy (1918 to 1941), and on the bedeviling issues of ethnic minorities and of peasants; the latter made up an overwhelming majority of much of the region's population. The book will be of great interest to political scientists and historians of East Central Europe, and of Europe more generally, and it is perfect for classroom use. - Irina Livezeanu, University of Pittsburgh, USA

The Secret Police and the Religious Underground in Communist and Post-Communist Eastern Europe
The Secret Police and the Religious Underground in Communist and Post-Communist Eastern Europe

Author: James A. Kapaló

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-08-12

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1000426068

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This book addresses the complex intersection of secret police operations and the formation of the religious underground in communist-era Eastern Europe. It discusses how religious groups were perceived as dangerous to the totalitarian state whilst also being extremely vulnerable and yet at the same time very resourceful. It explores how this particular dynamic created the concept of the "religious underground" and produced an extremely rich secret police archival record. In a series of studies from across the region, the book explores the historical and legal context of secret police entanglement with religious groups, presents case studies on particular anti-religious operations and groups, offers methodological approaches to the secret police materials for the study of religions, and engages in contemporary ethical and political debates on the legacy and meaning of the archives in post-communism.

Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe
Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe

Author: Lucian N. Leustean

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2014-07-02

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0823256081

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Nation-building processes in the Orthodox commonwealth brought together political institutions and religious communities in their shared aims of achieving national sovereignty. Chronicling how the churches of Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia acquired independence from the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s decline, Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe examines the role of Orthodox churches in the construction of national identities. Drawing on archival material available after the fall of communism in southeastern Europe and Russia, as well as material published in Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Russian, Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe analyzes the challenges posed by nationalism to the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the ways in which Orthodox churches engaged in the nationalist ideology.

Hidden Galleries
Hidden Galleries

Author: James A. Kapaló

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13: 3643912633

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In a series of richly illustrated short essays, Hidden Galleries presents the ways in which the secret police of the communist-era and before collected and curated material religious images and objects in their archives. Based on painstaking documentation by a team of eight historians, anthropologists and scholars of religion in archives in Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and Moldova, this volume offers a rare window on the creativity of underground religious life, and its ideological representation as well as exploring the significance for religious communities and wider society today of this legacy of repression and surveillance.

Text, Context and Performance
Text, Context and Performance

Author: James A. Kapaló

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-09-20

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9004216340

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Past scholarship on the Gagauz people has focused on their ethnic origins and the tension between their Christian faith and Turkish linguistic identity. This study, based on extensive fieldwork in the Republic of Moldova, approaches the problem of this central dichotomy in Gagauz identity through the lens of daily religious practices. This empirical approach reveals how scholarly discourses on ‘folk religion’ guide the local fieldworker’s identification of what are ‘folk’ religious practices and thus actualises 'folk religion' in a given context.The book offers a fresh methodological perspective on ‘folk religion’ as discourse and object of study and is the first monograph in a Western European language on the religion, history and identity of this under-studied European people.

The Political Anthropology of Ethnic and Religious Minorities
The Political Anthropology of Ethnic and Religious Minorities

Author: Arpad Szakolczai

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1351209175

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This book presents some arguments for why a political anthropological perspective can be particularly helpful for understanding the connected political and cultural challenges and opportunities posed by the situation of ethnic and religious minorities. The first chapter shortly introduces the major anthropological concepts used, including liminality, trickster, imitation and schismogenesis; concepts that are used together with approaches of historical sociology and genealogy, especially concerning the rise and fall of empires, and their lasting impact. The conceptual framework suggested here is particularly helpful for understanding how marginal places can become liminal, appearing suddenly at the center of political attention. The introduction also shows the manner in which minority existence can problematize the depersonalizing tendencies of modern globalization. Subsequent chapters demonstrate how the described political anthropological conceptual framework can be used in certain European regions, and in the case of certain ethnic and religious minority, and each illustrates that instead of charismatic leaders, trickster politicians are emerging and increasingly dominate, through the "public sphere", the space of modern politics emptied of real presence. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.