Download or read book Religion and Politics in Contemporary Russia written by Tobias Köllner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-13 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on extensive original research at the local level, this book explores the relationship between Russian Orthodoxy and politics in contemporary Russia. It reveals close personal links between politicians at the local, regional and national levels and their counterparts at the equivalent level in the Russian Orthodox Church – priests and monks, bishops and archbishops – who are extensively consulted about political decisions. It outlines a convergence of conservative ideology between politicians and clerics and also highlights that, despite working closely together, there are nevertheless many tensions. The book examines in detail particular areas of cooperation and tension: reform to religious education and a growing emphasis on traditional moral values, the restitution of former church property and the introduction of new festive days. Overall, the book concludes that there is much uncertainty, ambiguity and great local variation.
Download or read book Religion and Identity in Modern Russia written by Marietta Stepaniants and published by . This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the roles of Russian Orthodoxy and Islam in constituting, challenging and changing national and ethnic identities in Russia, this study takes Tsarist and Soviet legacies into account, paying special attention to the evolution of the relationship between religious teachings and political institutions through the late 19th and 20th centuries. The volume explicitly discusses and compares the role of Russia's two major religions, Orthodoxy and Islam, in forging identity in the modern era and brings an innovative blend of sociological, historical, linguistic and geographic scholarship to the problem of post-Soviet Russian identity. This comprehensive volume is suitable for courses on post-Soviet politics, Russian studies, religion and political culture.
Download or read book Religion and Politics in Russia A Reader written by Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-01-28 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia is not only vast, it is also culturally diverse, the core of an empire that spanned Eurasia. In addition to the majority Russian Orthodox and various other Christian groups, the Russian Federation includes large communities of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and members of other religious groups, some with ancient historical roots. All are in a state of ferment, and securing formal state recognition for specific communities is often daunting. This collection provides entry into the diversity of Russia's religious communities. Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer's introduction to the volume illuminates major political, social, and cultural-anthropological trends. The book is organized by religious tradition or identity, with further thematic perspectives on each set of readings. The authors include ethnologists, sociologists, political analysts, and religious leaders from many regions of the Federation. They analyze the changing dynamics of religion and politics within each community and in the context of the current drive to recentralize both political and religious authority in Moscow. Topical coverage extends from reassertions of Russian Orthodoxy to activities of Christian and Muslim missionaries to the revival of many other religions, including indigenous shamanic ones.
Download or read book Sacred Stories written by Mark D. Steinberg and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-24 with total page 867 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacred Stories brings together the work of leading scholars writing on the history of religion and religiosity in late imperial Russia during the critical decades preceding the 1917 revolutions. Embodying new research and new methodologies, this book reshapes our understanding of the place of religion in modern Russian history. Topics examined include miraculous icons and healing, pilgrim narratives, confessions, women and Orthodox domesticity, marriage and divorce, conversion and tolerance, Jewish folk beliefs, mysticism in Russian art, and philosophical aspects of Orthodox religious thought. Sacred Stories demonstrates that belief, spirituality, and the sacred were powerful and complex cultural expressions central to Russian political, social, economic, and cultural life. Contributors are Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heather J. Coleman, Gregory L. Freeze, Nadieszda Kizenko, Alexei A. Kurbanovsky, Roy R. Robson, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Gabriella Safran, Vera Shevzov, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Mark Steinberg, Paul Valliere, William G. Wagner, Paul W. Werth, and Christine D. Worobec.
Download or read book Between Heaven and Russia written by Sarah Riccardi-Swartz and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is religious conversion transforming American democracy? In one corner of Appalachia, a group of American citizens has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church and through it Putin’s New Russia. Historically a minority immigrant faith in the United States, Russian Orthodoxy is attracting Americans who look to Russian religion and politics for answers to western secularism and the loss of traditional family values in the face of accelerating progressivism. This ethnography highlights an intentional community of converts who are exemplary of much broader networks of Russian Orthodox converts in the US. These converts sought and found a conservatism more authentic than Christian American Republicanism and a nationalism unburdened by the broken promises of American exceptionalism. Ultimately, both converts and the Church that welcomes them deploy the subversive act of adopting the ideals and faith of a foreign power for larger, transnational political ends. Offering insights into this rarely considered religious world, including its far-right political roots that nourish the embrace of Putin’s Russia, this ethnography shows how religious conversion is tied to larger issues of social politics, allegiance, (anti)democracy, and citizenship. These conversions offer us a window onto both global politics and foreign affairs, while also allowing us to see how particular communities in the U.S. are grappling with social transformations in the twenty-first century. With broad implications for our understanding of both conservative Christianity and right-wing politics, as well as contemporary Russian-American relations, this book provides insight in the growing constellations of far-right conservatism. While Russian Orthodox converts are more likely to form the moral minority rather than the moral majority, they are an important gauge for understanding the powerful philosophical shifts occurring in the current political climate in the United States and what they might mean for the future of American values, ideals, and democracy.
Download or read book Holy Rus written by John P. Burgess and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating, vivid, and on-the-ground account of Russian Orthodoxy's resurgence A bold experiment is taking place in Russia. After a century of being scarred by militant, atheistic communism, the Orthodox Church has become Russia's largest and most significant nongovernmental organization. As it has returned to life, it has pursued a vision of reclaiming Holy Rus' that historical yet mythical homeland of the eastern Slavic peoples; a foretaste of the perfect justice, peace, harmony, and beauty for which religious believers long; and the glimpse of heaven on earth that persuaded Prince Vladimir to accept Orthodox baptism in Crimea in A.D. 988. Through groundbreaking initiatives in religious education, social ministry, historical commemoration, and parish life, the Orthodox Church is seeking to shape a new, post-communist national identity for Russia. In this eye-opening and evocative book, John Burgess examines Russian Orthodoxy's resurgence from a grassroots level, providing Western readers with an enlightening, inside look at the new Russia.
Download or read book Religion and Language in Post Soviet Russia written by Brian P. Bennett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-04-29 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Church Slavonic, one of the world’s historic sacred languages, has experienced a revival in post-Soviet Russia. Blending religious studies and sociolinguistics, this book looks at Church Slavonic in the contemporary period. It uses Slavonic in order to analyse a number of wider topics, including the renewal and factionalism of the Orthodox Church; the transformation of the Russian language; and the debates about protecting the nation from Western cults and culture.
Download or read book Religion and Identity in Modern Russia written by Marietta Stepaniants and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the roles of Russian Orthodoxy and Islam in constituting, challenging and changing national and ethnic identities in Russia, this study takes Tsarist and Soviet legacies into account, paying special attention to the evolution of the relationship between religious teachings and political institutions through the late 19th and 20th centuries. The volume explicitly discusses and compares the role of Russia's two major religions, Orthodoxy and Islam, in forging identity in the modern era and brings an innovative blend of sociological, historical, linguistic and geographic scholarship to the problem of post-Soviet Russian identity. This comprehensive volume is suitable for courses on post-Soviet politics, Russian studies, religion and political culture.
Download or read book Memory Politics in Contemporary Russia written by Mariëlle Wijermars and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-11 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the societal dynamics of memory politics in Russia. Since Vladimir Putin became president, the Russian central government has increasingly actively employed cultural memory to claim political legitimacy and discredit all forms of political opposition. The rhetorical use of the past has become a defining characteristic of Russian politics, creating a historical foundation for the regime’s emphasis on a strong state and centralised leadership. Exploring memory politics, this book analyses a wide range of actors, from the central government and the Russian Orthodox Church, to filmmaker and cultural heavyweight Nikita Mikhalkov and radical thinkers such as Aleksandr Dugin. In addition, in view of the steady decline in media freedom since 2000, it critically examines the role of cinema and television in shaping and spreading these narratives. Thus, this book aims to gain a better understanding of the various means through which the Russian government practices its memory politics (e.g., the role of state media) and, on the other hand, to sufficiently value the existence of alternative and critical voices and criticism that existing studies tend to overlook. Contributing to current debates in the field of memory studies and of current affairs in Russia and Eastern Europe, this book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of Russian Studies, Cultural Memory Studies, Nationalism and National Identity, Political Communication, Film, Television and Media Studies.
Download or read book The Politics of Religion in Soviet Occupied Germany written by Sean Brennan and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2011-11-25 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the religious policies of the Soviet military authorities and their allies in the Socialist Unity Party in the Soviet zone, but more importantly, who devised them, how they did so, and how they attempted to implement them. In doing so, it illustrates how the Soviet authorities recreated the Soviet zone along Stalinist lines with regards to religious policy, a process which they implemented throughout all of Eastern Europe as well in East Germany. While I examine how these policies were devised, I place greater emphasis on their implementation in the Soviet zone, especially its most important province, Berlin-Brandenburg. Furthermore, this book demonstrates how the leadership of the Churches responded to the policies of the Soviet military authorities and their allies in the Socialist Unity Party, especially after they took and increasingly anti-religious tone during the late 1940s. The diverse responses of the Church leadership in the Evangelical Church during the Soviet occupation reveal the foundations of the eventual break within the leadership of the Evangelical church in the 1960s over the issue of how to deal with the atheist SED-regime. At the same time, the stances of Evangelical Bishop Otto Dibelius and the Catholic Bishop Konrad von Preysing as stalwart opponents of the creation of the "second German dictatorship" in the 1940s demonstrate how Churches would become central actors in the East German dissident movement in the 1970s and 1980s.
Download or read book Orthodox Religion and Politics in Contemporary Eastern Europe written by Tobias Köllner and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores Orthodox religion and politics in Eastern Europe, Russia and Georgia. It shows how the relationship between religion and politics is complex, and how they complement, reinforce, influence, and sometimes contradict each other.
Download or read book Contemporary Russian Conservatism written by Mikhail Suslov and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-10-14 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first comprehensive study of the “conservative turn” in Russia under Putin. Its fifteen chapters, written by renowned specialists in the field, provide a focused examination of what Russian conservatism is and how it works. The book features in-depth discussions of the historical dimensions of conservatism, the contemporary international context, the theoretical conceptualization of conservatism, and empirical case studies. Among various issues covered by the volume are the geopolitical and religious dimensions of conservatism and the conservative perspective on Russian history and the politics of memory. The authors show that conservative ideology condenses and reworks a number of discussions about Russia’s identity and its place in the world. Contributors include: Katharina Bluhm, Per-Arne Bodin, Alicja Curanović, Ekaterina Grishaeva, Caroline Hill, Irina Karlsohn, Marlene Laruelle, Mikhail N. Lukianov, Kåre Johan Mjør, Alexander Pavlov, Susanna Rabow-Edling, Andrey Shishkov, Victor Shnirelman, Mikhail Suslov, and Dmitry Uzlaner
Download or read book Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine written by Catherine Wanner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine reveals how and why religion has become a pivotal political force in a society struggling to overcome the legacy of its entangled past with Russia and chart a new future. If Ukraine is "ground zero" in the tensions between Russia and the West, religion is an arena where the consequences of conflicts between Russia and Ukraine keenly play out. Vibrant forms of everyday religiosity pave the way for religion to be weaponized and securitized to advance political agendas in Ukraine and beyond. These practices, Catherine Wanner argues, enable religiosity to be increasingly present in public spaces, public institutions, and wartime politics in a pluralist society that claims to be secular. Based on ethnographic data and interviews conducted since before the Revolution of Dignity and the outbreak of armed combat in 2014, Wanner investigates the conditions that catapulted religiosity, religious institutions, and religious leaders to the forefront of politics and geopolitics.
Download or read book Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and East European Politics written by Sabrina P. Ramet and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious organizations in many countries of the communist world have served as agents for the preservation, defense, and reinforcement of nationalist feelings, and in playing this role have frequently been a source of frustration to the Communist Party elites. Although the relationship between governments and religious groups varies according to the particular country and group in question, the mosaic of these relationships constitutes a revealing picture of the political reform shaping the lives of Soviet and East European citizens.
Download or read book The Orthodox Church and Russian Politics written by Irina Papkova and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There is little written about the Russian Orthodox Church, and precious little by political scientists who use qualitative, critical methods. This book is a welcome contribution and will receive attention from political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists of religion." ---Catherine Wanner. Associate Professor of History. Anthropology and Religious Studies. Penn State University --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective written by Ted Gerard Jelen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion is resurgent across the globe. In many countries religion is a powerful source of political mobilization, and in some a potent social cleavage. In some religion reinforces the state, in others it provides the space for resistance. This book contains a series of detailed studies examining religion and politics in specific countries or regions. The cases include countries with one dominant religious tradition, and others with two or more competing traditions. They include Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Hinduism, Shinto and Buddhism. They include states where religion and politics are closely linked, and others with at least a low wall of separation between church and state. The cases are organized by the type of religious marketplace, but allow many other comparisons as well. We develop some generalizations from the cases, and hope that they will be a fertile source of theorizing for others.
Download or read book The Religious Factor in Russia s Foreign Policy written by Alicja Curanović and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how religion interacts with Russian foreign policy, arguing that religion is an important and neglected factor in shaping Russia’s outlook towards international relations. It surveys the importance of religion for social life in Russia, both historically and at present, and considers a wide range of Russian attitudes which are affected by religion – such as Russian nationalism, notions of Slavic solidarity, the divine mission of Russian Orthodox civilisation, Russian imperialism, Russia’s special approach towards Islam. The book discusses how religious organizations, especially the Russian Orthodox Church, operate in international relations, pursuing their own interests and those of the Russian state; explores how religious ideas and culture linked to religion impinge on Russian attitudes and identity, and thereby affect policy; and demonstrates how policy influenced by religion impacts on Russian foreign policy in practice in a wide range of examples, including Russia’s relations with other orthodox countries, non-orthodox Western countries, Muslim countries, Israel and the Vatican.
