Between Revival and Atheization: Statecraft, Identity, and Religious Transformation in the Former Yugoslavia

After Georgia regained its independence following the collapse of the Soviet regime, national and religious identities gained particular importance. A religious revival was observed not only among Christians but also among the country's Muslim communities. The region of Adjara is populated by Georgians who profess Islam. The aim of this paper is to explore the transformation of the religious landscape in Georgia and the idiosyncratic characteristics of identity in post-Soviet Adjara. The change in Adjara's religious landscape has resulted in a specific and eclectic picture. Muslim identity in Georgia creates a religious and cultural model rooted in the specific historical, political, and cultural development of the region. For Muslim Adjarians Islam is the "religion of their forefathers" and at the same time part of their national [Georgian] identity. However, due to the long-standing dominance of the Christian national narrative in public discourse, Muslim identity has remained "suspicious." Hence, Muslim Adjarians have suffered the traumatic experience of being perceived by the mainstream, Christian majority as not "perfect Georgians" because of their Islamic identity. Alongside this perception of marginality, Muslim Georgians demonstrate a particular Islamic identity with high intercultural competencies and tolerance.

PurposeMost of 823,000 ethnic Chinese people are living in Southern Vietnam among distinct dialectical groups. Each maintains its own pantheon of gods; the majority worships standardized Thien Hau. The Hakka in Buu Long are the only group that worships the craft-master gods. This difference creates a challenging gap between the subgroups and reveals the unorthodox nature of the Hakka’s traditions. The purpose of this paper is investigate the continuous efforts to achieve “evolving standardization” and solidarity through the charismatic efforts of the local Hakka elites in Buu Long by their liturgical transformation.Design/methodology/approachThe study further discusses the multilateral interaction and hidden discourses by applying Watson’s (1985) theory of standardization and orthodoxy as well as Weller’s (1987) concept of context-based interpretation.FindingsTruthfully, when facing pressures, the Hakka in Southern Vietnam decided to transform their non-standard worship of the craft masters into a more integrative model, the Thien Hau cult, by superimposing the new cult on the original platform without significant changes in either belief or liturgical practice. The performance shows to be the so-called “the caterpillar’s spirit under a butterfly’s might” case.Research limitations/implicationsThe transformation reveals that the Hakka are currently in their endless struggles for identity and integration, even getting engaged in a pseudo-standardization.Social implicationsThis Hakka’s bottom-up evolutionary standardization deserves to be responded academically and practically.Originality/valueThe paper begins with a setting of academic discussions by western writers in this area and then moves on to what makes the practical transformation, how does it happen, and what discourses are hidden underneath.

Civic Religion: Community, Identity and Religious Transformation

Integral to the Life Orientation curriculum is democracy and human right. This article contends that considering human rights cannot simply be a theoretical exercise as the implementation thereof affects lived human experience. Currently held narratives of lived experience need to be dialogically explored. Integrally linked to any such exploration is the identity of the explorer. It can be said that individuals are made to varying degrees by systems and networks of power in society, including dominant discourses. However, they also have the capacity, by exercising individual agency, to make themselves according to the way in which they respond to the intersections that shape identity, including ethnicity, culture, class, religion, gender, sexual orientation and so forth. This article seeks to explore teacher identity and, in particular, teacher religious identity, with a view to transformed Religion Education. The argument is made for Life Orientation teachers to negotiate their religious identity from a position of ‘religious identity paralysis’ or ‘religious identity paradox’ or even ‘religious identity flexibility’ to one of ‘religious identity transformation’. Both in-service and pre-service teachers participated in the studies informing this article.

The goals of this chapter are: (a) to explore the process of religious transformations due to modernization in a specific context, Argentina from World War II to the election of Jorge Bergoglio as pope; (b) to identify some features of the ‘transformed’ Catholicism, meaning the lived religion of Argentinean Catholics; and (c) to speculate how this specific background may affect Francis tenure at the Vatican. In the particular context of Latin America, many Catholic believers (laypersons, ministries, and bishops) in different countries became involved in the processes of social transformation and even fostered revolutionary movements. Argentine Catholics’ positions toward their country’s social changes were shaped by their political context as well as by the transformation of religious identity. I will highlight here some events that I see as thresholds crossed in a direction that is unlikely to be changed. These transformations of Argentinean Catholicism may provide an interpretative framework for Francis’ tenure as head of the Catholic Church.

A still poorly understood, let alone explained, page of history is the evolution of pagan cult places in the Western Roman empire from the 3rd to the 5th century ce. Based on available sources, all, or nearly all, has already been said on the restoration of the imperial state and Roman city-states after the crisis of the 3rd century, the slow integration of Christian communities into the life of cities, and the continuity of paganism until its near destruction under Theodosius at the end of the 4th century. At the same time, the transformation of public religious systems organised by cities from the Augustan period onwards remains in large part unknown. The reason for this is first and foremost the disappearance of epigraphical sources after 250 ce, poorly replaced by the works of Christian or pagan writers, often rhetorical and polemical. This chapter evaluates the fundamental problem of religious transformations in the 4th century, starting from the results of recent excavations, showing that a certain number of great civic sanctuaries, built and restored at great expense by local elites from the 1st to the beginning of the 3rd century, had already been abandoned and even dismantled in the second half of the 3rd century. This phase of abandonment, occurring before the conversion of Constantine and the rise of Christianity as the official religion, reveals an essential change in religious practices in the provinces and a transformation of religious identities, in the way of being pagan. Related to this is the transformation of the urban landscape in the provinces of Gaul, confirming that the celebration of public sacrifices and ludi scaenici, of big festivals, seems to have ceased in the 4th century, the fortification of towns taking priority over religious festivals. What was it, then, to be pagan or Christian in the 4th century in Gaul, when the big festivals had ceased, and when Christian communities were not yet constructing monumental meeting places or churches and cathedrals, a process only documented by archaeology from the very end of the 4th century and into the 5th century?