Religious Revival Research Articles

International Organizations and International Politics After the Religious Resurgence: Jordan and the Islamic Countries, Aiming for a New Paradigm

International Organizations and International Politics After the Religious Resurgence: Jordan and the Islamic Countries, Aiming for a New Paradigm

ДЕЛО О КНЯЗЕ ЕФИМЕ МЕЩЕРСКОМ, ИМЕВШЕМ «В ДОМЕ ОСОБЛИВУЮ ГОРНИЦУ ДЛЯ СХОДБИЩА МНОГИМ ЛЮДЯМ, РАЗГЛАШАЯ ЯКОБЫ ЧУДЕСА, ПРОИСХОДЯЩИЕ ОТ ОБРАЗА ПРЕСВЯТОЙ БОГОРОДИЦЫ»

The published text is an extract from the 18th century case of Prince Efim Meshchersky, which shows the Prince’s atypical religious practice and reverence for the miracle-working Smolensk icon of the Mother of God kept in his house.

Eastern Orthodoxy in the processes of the post-communist political transformations

It is a sort of truism in the social sciences that since the late 1970s the world has been witnessing the great return of religion into global politics and international relations. Paradigm shift in theorists’ concepts and practitioners’ perception of previously underestimated dimension were tremendously influenced by the chain of events signaled the new role of religion in politics, and among them by the explosive religious revival in countries where the Eastern Orthodoxy was the majority religion which started even well before the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia. Eastern Orthodoxy is the major religious denomination in 12 European countries, all but two of which (Greece and Cyprus) are former communist states. In this perspective , reasoning over Orthodoxy’s destiny is to greater extent reasoning over the post-communist political development as a phenomenon. Article proves that Eastern Orthodoxy provided post-communist states with symbolism and common ideological ground for both leftists and rightists, former communists and former dissenters, and extended a symbolic framework to the so-called Soviet people who lost the sense of belonging and were searching for their new identity. Orthodox Churches that saw itself and were widely perceived as the historic repository of nationhood, national values, and, quite often, as the savior of a nation's very existence, suggested itself as a main actor in the process of new identity building. Orthodoxy became the primary vehicle for the awakening of collective identity for the groups surrounded by or competed with groups of different religions. This trend was very clear in some of the episodes which marked the first postcommunist decade. Conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the northern Caucasus and Transcaucasia were given a strong religious emphasis and religion was rapidly turned into the factor of political and national mobilization. At the same time, the aspiration of the newly independent states to gain the independence of their churches from Moscow and Belgrade has created an additional powerful geopolitical source of tension. While the process of bestowing Autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in Ukraine that met with fierce resistance from the Russian state, showed how far Russia could go to maintain ecclesiastical control over Ukraine. And also, what is the role of Orthodoxy as a symbolic and institutional resource in contemporary political processes. Key words: religion and politics, Eastern Orthodoxy, Post-Communist transformations

New Life of Old Mongolian Demons

New Life of Old Mongolian Demons Alevtina Solovyeva (bio) Introduction: Demons under Research In contemporary Mongolian culture, traditional supernatural characters and phenomena are very popular and significant figures in different spheres of life, playing various roles and supplying diverse meanings to personal and public issues. Following the collapse of the socialist regime in the 1990s and the end of its 70-year span of official atheism and restrictions on spiritual expressions, all sorts of deities, spirits, and demons returned to everyday life, aided by the waves of religious revival, openness (glasnost), and new ideologies that favored “traditional roots.” Old traditional characters have kicked the dust from their shoes and flowed into new contexts in this period of drastic and rapid change, and they have provided forms and interpretations for personal experiences (Honko) and collective challenges (Valk, “Ghostly”). In this article, I discuss two sorts of supernatural entity active in Mongolian contemporary life: moving lights and a running woman.1 These are old traditional figures, part of road and travel beliefs and landscape mythology, who were popular in former times and remain so today.2 They are known in every local narrative tradition in Mongolia and present intriguing examples of contemporization. I will describe the specific features of their images and plots and the modifications [End Page 281] they underwent to stay relevant to the conditions and issues of the present. I also discuss their updated meanings and functions in today’s narrative culture and discursive practices. I collected the contemporary data by examining these supernatural entities in personal and public discourses, in narratives of different genres that I drew from media sources (newspapers and internet), and from fieldwork interviews in Mongolia during annual research visits beginning in 2007. To trace the existence of these entities in the past and investigate their trajectories by comparative analysis, I turned to previous published and unpublished written sources, generally represented by narrative collections of scholars and travelers dating back to the close of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Inasmuch as the goals of my research include investigating these characters and phenomena in their textual and social dimensions, I use a combination of approaches to analyze structural and semantic characteristics of these narrative examples (Propp; Neklyudov, “Zametki”; Levkievskai͡a), their modes of transformation, and the dynamics of their pragmatics, functions, and social representations (Ben-Amos; Honko; Valk, “Ontological”). Moving Lights My first set of examples: moving lights/marsh lights that mislead night travelers, a phenomenon also known in many other traditions.3 In Mongolian folklore, this phenomenon, known as chötgöriin gal (demonic fire, ghost light(s), demonic lights),4 can be seen as moving around the steppe, chasing night travelers (and eluding them), talking, being noisy, and even (in some rare cases) physically affecting the person who might accidentally touch them. In contemporary folk traditions, these motifs appear in two basic forms. The first of these has much in common with examples found in earlier folklore collections (Hangalov; Potanin): Chötgöriin gal, demonic lights, exist, they show up at night on the steppe. Once I met such light. I was returning from my brother’s family, it was already dark, suddenly the light appeared. I wondered what it could be and tried to approach it, but the light did not let me come closer and kept escaping. I felt uncomfortable and continued on my way. Then this light started to follow me, keeping at a distance: when I moved, it moved too, when I stopped, it stopped. The light was [End Page 282] following me to my village, before it suddenly fell over a bush and disappeared. People often see such lights, and sometimes hear something calling them by name. (Tsermaa 18) Another variant, more popular nowadays, contains a number of substantial modifications: Once we went with my wife to visit her relatives and were returning late in the evening. Suddenly in the middle of the way back we saw that bad light. My wife first saw it. I did not believe her, but then I too saw the strange light. It was coming to us from the right side of the road. It looks like a...

An Extraordinary Ordinary Woman: The Journal of Phebe Orvis, 1820–1830 by Susan M. Ouellette

Reviewed by: An Extraordinary Ordinary Woman: The Journal of Phebe Orvis, 1820–1830 by Susan M. Ouellette Sara C. Evenson (bio) An Extraordinary Ordinary Woman: The Journal of Phebe Orvis, 1820–1830 By Susan M. Ouellette. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. 386pages, 6" x 9". $34.95 paper, $34.95 ebook. Poised between the revolutionary tumult and antebellum tension lies an often overlooked chapter of history—the era of the New Republic. Despite being overshadowed in many ways, this period is fundamental to our understanding of American history. It was during this period that Phebe Orvis lived her ordinary extraordinary life in rural Vermont and the New York frontier. During her lifetime Phebe experienced and engaged with a world in which American identities were being negotiated and formed; where rural, white hinterland settlements became increasingly connected to urban areas, prompting increased frontier settlement; where the fervor of the Second Great Awakening kindled religious revivals and conversions; where global commercial entanglement complicated an individual's relationship with the market; and where, perhaps most importantly for Phebe, women were forced to reconcile their place in a shifting world with their personal ideas of love, romance, and duty. In short, it was a time of intense change that seemed in many ways to be intangible. Susan M. Ouellette's exploration of Phebe Orvis's journal brings this critical period of American history to life in an engaging and incredibly readable narrative. In this book Ouellette sets out to explore the life of Phebe Orvis and the ways in which the New Republic developed in rural Vermont and New York. She accomplishes this through a quick six chapters that chronologically follow Phebe's life from the age of nineteen to twenty-nine. The journal begins with Phebe as a young woman living on her grandparents' Vermont farm, negotiating courtship, family enterprise, and educational aspirations. The journal reveals heartbreaking moments of disappointment and compromise as Phebe relocates from her home to the New York frontier, marries, and bears her children. It ends in 1830, as Phebe's life as mother and domestic producer overtake her time. The chapters are brief but informative, and a full transcription of the journal is included as an appendix. For those who are unfamiliar with the geographic region in question, three maps are included to orient oneself to the key locations of the journal. Drawing on past scholarship such as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, Ouellette delicately explores the ways in which the ordinariness of this journal is actually quite extraordinary during this period. By situating Phebe's hyperlocal journal entries within a larger web of social and cultural trends, Ouellette proves deft at extracting meaning from what might otherwise be overlooked as purely quotidian. For example, Ouellette urges her readers to "use imagination and make certain leaps of faith to tease out the details" [End Page 438] of Phebe's life (1). Such use of imagination allows Ouellette to understand Phebe's relationships based on the ways in which individuals are notated in the journal. Phebe's onagain–off-again relationship with Adolphus Taylor is interpreted via the way in which she notes his name, ranging from "Mr. A. Taylor" to "Mr. Adolphus Taylor" to simply "Adolphus." While it may sometimes feel that Ouellette is reading too far into Phebe's journal, I believe that her conclusions are entirely reasonable and based in a firm understanding of the historical period. Indeed, the great strength of this book is in Ouellette's ability to connect a microhistorical narrative with important national and global themes. Without these thematic connections, Phebe's journal is an antiquarian curiosity, and thematic history remains a detached and faceless narrative. Ouellette additionally demonstrates the very tangible ways in which the market impacted lives during Phebe's lifetime. Following in the path of Paul E. Johnson's works A Shopkeeper's Millennium and Sam Patch the Famous Jumper, Ouellette gives concrete examples of how market shifts directly impacted everyday life. In her Vermont home, Phebe is used to a certain level of access to manufactured goods and the society that accompanies a more settled and established area. One of her great...

CHRISTIAN CLERGY IN THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL REVIVAL OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE XIXth – THE FIRST THIRD OF THE XXth CENTURY: MODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY

The purpose of the research – to represent and analyze the latest studies on the history of cultural, educational, social and national organizing activities of the clergy during the period of the Ukrainian national and cultural revival of the second half of the XIXth – the first third of the XXth century. First of all, attention is paid to the coverage of the content of scientific works dedicated to the elucidation of the Orthodox, Greek-Catholic and Protestant clergy's contribution to the rise of the Ukrainian national movement and spiritual, religious revival. The study is based on a civilizational and socio-cultural methodology, a systematic scientific and conceptual approach to a historiographical analysis, the tools of which made it possible to achieve the priorities of scientificity and objectivity in the coverage of the historiographical facts, historicism and continuity in the formation of a historiographical narrative, interdisciplinarity and integration of historiographical conclusions. The scientific provisions are based on the principles of a confessional neutrality and worldview pluralism. The research methodology is inspired by the interpretation objectives of the historians' scientific achievements in analyzing the interactions of religious, ecclesiastical and cultural educational activities of the clergy of different denominations, clarification of their contribution to the spiritual revival of the Ukrainians. The scientific novelty of the presented study consists in the actualization, systematization and analysis of the latest historical researches, which deal with the cultural, educational activities of the clergy during the period of the Ukrainian national revival. To systematize the relevant historiographical narrative the thematic metaphorical concept of “Department of Historiography” has been introduced; the heuristic potential of modern historical studies for confessionally neutral and scientific interpretation of the place and role of the clerical factor in the Ukrainian national history has been considered. The Conclusions. In modern historiography the idea is traced that the religious, ecclesiastical and cultural educational activities of the clergy played an important role in the development and rise of the Ukrainian national movement during the second half of the ХІХth – the first third of the ХХth century. The process analysis of knowledge accumulation on the history of the clergy illustrates the following: historians focus on the study of cultural, educational, social work of the Orthodox, the Greek-Catholic and the Protestant clergy. It is on the basis of this principle that the historians are united into three so-called “Departments of Historiography”. The historians consider the social mission of the Orthodox priests in a dualistic way, noting both their commitment to the Russian hierarchy as well as the national aspirations of some Orthodox priests to fight for the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodoxy. The historians analyze the activities of the Greek-Catholic priests in the context of their orientation to an active socio-political activity, emphasizing the Ukrainian priorities of their ecclesiastical and national identity. Instead, the historians elucidate the initiatives of the Protestants in the context of the new socio-economic realities of the imperial era (ethics of capitalism), emphasizing the significant contribution of the Protestant pastors to the development of interreligious relations in Ukraine during the period under analysis. A positive feature of a modern historiography is the erosion of the Soviet atheistic historiographical paradigm and historians' refusal from the one-sided reception of the historical process. The fact is also important that the vast majority of historians, who specialized in religion and church, did not mechanically change their atheistic approach to a confessional one, but they still adhere to a rationalist research paradigm, forming scientific postulates on the priorities of scientificity, objectivity and a confessional neutrality

“The winter of history came suddenly...”: the concept of time in the poems of Victor Krivulin

The article is devoted to the problem of historicism in the texts of the Leningrad unofficial poet and critic Viktor Krivulin. The novelty of the study is an attempt to consider the poetic historiosophy of Krivulin in the context of the “religious revival” of the 1970s in the USSR. This approach allows us not only to determine the specifics of the images of time in the works of Krivulin, but also to outline the contours of the intellectual history of Soviet unofficial culture. Special attention is paid to eschatological motives in Krivulin's works, as well as to the opposition of the “horizontal” and “vertical” types of time. Everyday reality, with its measured course of events subordinated to the chronological order, is overcome in Krivulin's texts by entering the sacred sphere of culture, where creative dialogue with literary predecessors is endowed with a special value status. It was cultural co-creation that allowed the unofficial poet to go beyond the static late Soviet experience and rediscover his identity. The images of time in Krivulin's texts are associated with Christian eschatology, which assumes the finality of historical existence. This was most clearly manifested in the transformation of the image of Leningrad, which appeared in the works of Krivulin as a “ghost town”, in which history stopped.

Religiosity of the urban community in Kazakhstan

Religious values as the most important component of the worldview can significantly affect various aspects of human life - from everyday practices to political preferences. The analysis of changes in religiosity shows that in the post-Soviet space, there is a clear tendency of the transition from atheistic attitudes to the religious revival. In the contemporary Kazakhstan society, a complex model of religious identity develops - it combines ideals and norms of religious consciousness with ideas of spirituality and national revival, but the confession values can often only be of an external, declarative nature. According to different studies, in Kazakhstan, the share of believers following religious practices increases. The question is whether people really observe religious rites and traditions and follow religious regulations. The article summarizes the results of the study conducted by the Center for the Study of Public Opinion to assess the religiosity of the Almaty urban community. The survey showed that the share of people who identify themselves as a part of some confession is significant; however, this is not a direct indicator of the increase in the number of true believers seeking to actively follow all religious rules and practices. The article presents the data on the activity of respondents in religious practices, their knowledge and understanding of some religious postulates. The study showed that the religious renaissance among the youth can be accompanied by undeveloped religious consciousness and insufficient religious knowledge, which provides grounds for the dissemination of pseudo-religious ideas including the extremist ones.

Religious Revival as Basis of the Modern Kryashen National Movement

The article is devoted to the analysis of the role of the religious factor in the development of the sub-ethnic national movement studying the case of the Kryashens. The study is based on Jose Casanova’s concept of the religious revival. Following Casanova, the author assumes that religious identity can become the basis of an ethnic identity only if religion transforms from a state-oriented institution into an institution oriented towards the society and actively participating in its improvement. At the same time, revealing the dynamic nature of the formation of the (sub)ethnic groups, the author relies on the ethnosymbolic concept of John Hutchinson, which focuses on the importance of the ethnically significant symbols. In the case of the Kryashens a religious marker represents such a symbol. The article examines in detail two stages of the Kryashens’ religious revival. The first stage occurred in the second half of the 19th century and was associated primarily with the missionary activity of Nikolay Ilminsky. The second stage started in 1989 and continues today. The research carried out by the author lends unequivocal support to the idea that religion played a key role in the formation of an original Kryashen ethno-cultural identity. At the same time, it shows that within Kryashens’ religiosity the vector is directed from society to religion rather than from religion to society. Their religious identity is instrumental. However, although there are very few ultra-religious people in the Kryashen community and most of the Kryashens are secularized, religion remains one of the most important markers of their ethnic identity.

Religion as Financial Asset: State Investments in Chinese Buddhism

This study uncovers reasons why Buddhist sites in China since the time of Mao have received government patronage, and it argues that economic development at Buddhist sacred sites has resulted in religious revivalism—a perhaps unintended consequence of state support. The focus of the work is at Mount Putuo—the home of the Bodhisattva Guanyin—and data collected come from fieldwork during the summers of 2012 and 2013. The first portion of the study examines the various ways individuals have sponsored Buddhist sites through Chinese history and identifies the upholding of miracle tales, the financing of temples and the creation of religious commodities as particularly significant. The second portion of the study examines and evaluates contemporary financing, especially the processes of commodification that shape sacred sites like Mount Putuo. At the conclusion of this article, the author argues that Buddhist practice today has not been hindered by economic development but instead revived.

Franciscan Women Religious in Nineteenth-Century Belgium : Gender, Identity and Material Recovery

Abstract This article examines the revival of female Franciscan religious communities in the nineteenth-century as a platform for analyzing the mechanisms and networks behind the restoration and renewal of female convent life in Belgium. The analysis is conducted from a threefold perspective: the specific role of male and female protagonists, the struggle with old and new identities, and the material backgrounds of the revival. The diverse landscape of old and new, contemplative and apostolic, and urban and rural Franciscan convents and congregations offers an interesting platform for research. The interaction between secular clergy, lay and religious women and the male Friars Minor is examined within the context of changing political regimes, social changes, religious revival and diocesan centralization. Mechanisms of material recovery and the (re-)constructions of gendered, canonical and religious identities are used as a framework for evaluating the importance of old and new models and examining to what extent this nineteenth-century history was a genuine Franciscan revival.

Суфийский джамаат «Исмаил ага» на территории Поволжья: появление, распространение, отношение к нему государства и общества

The article deals with the investigation of religious revival processes, observed in the post-Soviet period. The process of religious revival took place among the Muslims on the territory of the Volga region, accompanied by the emergence of new religious movements of Islamic origin, many of which had their spiritual centers in the Middle East. It is stated that alongside the emergence of Salafi groups, recognized as extremist and terrorist or-ganizations in the 2000s, the followers of various Sufi jamaats from Turkey also appeared – Ismail Agha is supposed to be one of the most pronounced. The peak of its activity in the region begins with Kamil Samigullin’s coming to the post of Tatarstan mufti in 2013, belonging to this Sufi community. He begins to appoint Ismail Agha murids to the posts of imams and mukhtasibs, simultaneously expanding his influence outside Tatarstan, meeting some resistance, both from the Muslim clergy and from government agencies in charge of the religious sphere in the region. At the same time, the process of strengthening the influence of this particular Sufi brother-hood is taking place against the background of a general shift towards Sufism in the Middle Volga region: today different branches of the Naqshbandi Tariqa are represented in the region, and there are also groups of murids of the Qadiri and Shazili tariqas. Such a variety of Sufism in the Muslim Ummah of the Volga region is caused by the fact that different centers of its historical area (Turkey, Central Asia and the North Caucasus) exert influ-ence through their murids. At the same time, the Sufis themselves are in no hurry to openly advertise their pres-ence, largely due to the minimization of conflicts with the Salafists, whose influence in the Islamic Ummah of Tatarstan is noticeably preserved.

Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority: The Bai People of Southwest China by Liang Yongjia

Reviewed by: Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority: The Bai People of Southwest China by Liang Yongjia Megan Bryson Liang Yongjia, Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority: The Bai People of Southwest China. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. x, 176 pp. US$124 (hb). ISBN 978-0-415-52850-4 One of the best-known works on the Dali 大理 region of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province remains Francis L.K. Hsu’s 1948 Under the Ancestors’ Shadow, which treats the residents of the pseudonymous West Town as paradigmatically Han, though today most officially belong to the Bai 白 minzu 民族 (ethnic group or “nationality”). Both before and after Hsu conducted fieldwork in West Town (now openly recognized as Xizhou 喜洲, a town on the northwest side of Er Lake 洱海), scholars visiting Dali have developed widely divergent views of Bai ethnicity vis-à-vis majority Han culture. Some argue that the Bai are essentially no different from the Han, and the minzu label preserves ethnic difference where no cultural difference survives; others argue that, while some Bai people might represent themselves as Chinese or Han under certain conditions, specific cultural differences—especially language, but also including religion—distinguish them as a separate ethnic group.1 Liang Yongjia’s Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority: The Bai People of Southwest China returns to Hsu’s fieldwork site, Xizhou, to revisit many of the issues that Hsu raised in the 1940s. As its title indicates, Religious and Ethnic Revival in a Chinese Minority focuses on the connections between the reform-era (1978–present) celebration of ethnic culture and revival of religious practices in Xizhou, the Dali region, and the PRC more broadly. Liang argues that the two phenomena of ethnic and religious revival are, in fact, joined in their common goal of attaining what Liang refers to as transcendence and alterity. The introduction lays out the terms of this argument, which centers around these two concepts of transcendence and alterity. Liang does not explain what he means by transcendence, but his use of the term suggests that it refers to a utopian or idealized state. For example, he describes the Chinese state, in its imperial and communist forms, as offering a kind of universal transcendence that encompasses all religions. Liang explains his use of alterity a bit more, quoting Marshall Sahlins (who in turn was quoting Viveiros de Castro): “Since death exists, it is necessary for society to be linked with something that is outside itself – and that it be linked socially to this exterior” (p. 10). Alterity is this exteriority, or “something” outside society. Liang chooses this concept to get around more limiting terms such as “the supernatural” or “power.” He argues that establishing contact with alterity is the goal of both ethnic and religious revival. Liang’s approach is admirable for resisting reductionist readings of religion as a political or economic epiphenomenon, or as an exercise of social power played out through a postcolonial framework of oppression and resistance. However, his own framework needs further clarification. The concept of transcendence and the relationship between transcendence and alterity are particularly unclear. Liang observes that, through the PRC’s minzu identification project, “[e]thnic identity thus gained transcendence that oriented towards the communist alterity” (p. 11). Even if we understand “communist alterity” [End Page 300] as the utopian socialist future, the concepts of “ethnic identity gaining transcendence,” “religious transcendence,” and “communist transcendence” remain obscure both on their own and in connection with alterity. Given the long histories and complex uses of the terms transcendence and alterity in Religious Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Literary Criticism, they need significantly more attention to underpin the book’s overall argument. Chapter 1 introduces the backgrounds of Xizhou and Dali history, with a focus on kingship in the Nanzhao 南詔 and Dali kingdoms (the dates of which Liang gives as 652–899 and 937–1254, respectively) that ruled modern-day Yunnan Province and surrounding areas until the Mongol conquest. Liang follows Marshall Sahlins’s notion of the “stranger-king” to argue that Nanzhao and Dali rulers were outsiders who married into powerful indigenous families and then claimed kingship. Kings thus embodied alterity, and...

Edgar Allan Poe: Amateur Psychologist

Edgar Allan Poe: Amateur Psychologist

«Evrejskij vopros» v gorodskom religioznom prostranstve Dagestana: osobennosti i tendencii (1990—2000-e gg.)

After the collapse of state socialism and in the conditions of the unfolding dramatic process of transformations of the religious landscape, ethnic identification began to serve to preserve the sociocultural specificity of an ethnic group. Based on this, one of the primary questions for us is the analysis of the influence of religious revival on the Jewish population of Dagestan and the identification of the totality of the features and problems of the Jewish population in the ethno-confessional space of the national region.

The Mystery of the Uniqueness of the Religious Consciousness of Saami

The article explores the religious ideas of the Saami. Since ancient times the Saami have been considered the most powerful and skilled sorcerers in Europe. The researchers note the special richness and complexity of Sami paganism. Under the pressure from Scandinavian Germanic tribes and Slavs, this small and peaceful people was gradually pushed back to the northern part of Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula. In the 14th – 15th centuries, the Saami were subjected to Christian missionary work by the Swedes, the Norwegians and the Russians. Some of the Saami adopted Christianity, while the pagan ideas of the others were influenced by Christianity. Under Soviet rule, the Saami were subjected to mass migrations, political repression and forced atheization. Positive changes in the life of the Saami occurred during perestroika, in the late 1980s and 90s. At that time, there was a rise in national and civil consciousness. Perestroika in Russia coincided with the rise of the national Saami movement in the Scandinavian countries. At last, the Nordic countries went for the organization of Saami elected bodies – parliaments, democratically defending Saami interests. These "parliaments" actually have only consultative rights and no real political powers. Perestroika opened up state borders and the Kola Saami began to receive not only humanitarian aid from neighbouring countries, but also their enthusiasm for national revival. Public activists, scientists, journalists and artists came from Norway, Finland and Sweden. On this national wave there is also a religious revival of pagan beliefs. The leader of the Saami Parliament, Valentina Sovkina, plays a leading role in the national movement and in the revival of paganism. The Saami movement has found itself in a confrontation with the Murmansk provincial authorities, but with the beginning of the Governorate of Andrei Chibis, a tendency towards constructive interaction has been outlined.

Searching for comfort in religion: insecurity and religious behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy

ABSTRACT The impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had on the lives of many is indisputable. Among the possible strategies to cope with the feeling of insecurity that comes with this, religion can play a significant role. Using first-hand data from the ResPOnsE COVID-19 rolling cross-section survey, this article shows that Italian people who reported a COVID-19 contagion in their family reported also higher religiosity both in terms of attendance at religious services (via web, radio and tv) and prayer during the pandemic. The result holds primarily for those who received religious socialization during their childhood, and this reinforces the role of family transmission as a way to shape religious beliefs and behaviours and to provide individuals with religious coping strategies. These findings suggest that under dramatic circumstances a short-term religious revival is possible, even in contexts where the process of secularization is ongoing.

Religious revival or control? Reading the spatial politics of an officially atheist country’s planning of religious scenic areas: Three cases in Shaanxi, China

This article re-conceptualizes the secular-religious relationship by examining the ‘secularized’ sacred sites (temples) and the ‘sanctified’ secular places (religious-themed scenic areas built upon the temples). This article begins with acknowledging the dialectical secular-religious relationship and pushes this line of theorization further from a socio-spatial perspective. By using the ‘trialectics of spatiality’ analytical framework, this article examines the production/reproduction of both the secular and the religious spaces that determined and were simultaneously determined by the diversified religion-state relations. Contextualized in the 2000s when the Chinese state held ambivalence towards religions, this article presents a comparative study of the spatial interaction between the local state and the religious personnel respectively around the planning of three state-sponsored religious cultural scenic areas. By delving into the territorial strategy of simulation, this article demonstrates how and why Chinese secular and religious agents deliberately crossed over the socially constructed boundaries between the normatively defined secular and religious domain.

ДЕСЕКУЛЯРИЗАЦИЯ В РОССИЙСКОМ ОБЩЕСТВЕ: ПРЕДПОСЫЛКИ И ПРОЯВЛЕНИЯ

законных основаниях, хотя и в очень узких пределах. Она включала обращение к религиозной проблематике в сфере культурного творчества и культурной деятельности, а также оживление религиозных и мировоззренческих исканий в советском обществе в 60-80-е годы ХХ века. Позднесоветское и постсоветское возрождение религии не возникло внезапно, но представляло собой развитие и разрастание десекуляризационных тенденций, начавшихся в советском обществе еще в середине ХХ века, несмотря на продолжавшуюся политику ограничения религиозной деятельности и атеистического воспитания.
 Перспективы использования результатов исследования. Результаты исследования могут использоваться в дальнейшем изучении религиозной динамики российского общества.

Фарисейство: образ и смыслы

The article deals with the image of Pharisaism as a multidimensional and complex phenomenon with a wide semantic field. The authors trace the way of formation of this image, from the text of the New Testament and the writings of the Holy fathers of the Church, to the analysis of the meanings of this concept in modern Orthodox literature. The authors distinguish and consider various aspects of the image of Pharisaism: moral, religious-psychological, existential. These aspects reflect different features of the image, but in the aggregate they give an opportunity to describe the whole image of Pharisaism. The article contents the analysis of Pharisaism as a distorted form of religious consciousness, and a comparative analysis between the Pharisaism and the true religiosity, as it is understood in the tradition of Russian religious philosophy, is carried out. The authors also analyze the manifestations of Pharisaism at the level of social and religious phenomena, which allows them to move from the consideration of Pharisaism as an internal order phenomenon to its analysis as a social phenomenon. The article raises the question of the institutionalization of Pharisaism as one of the problems accompanying the modern religious revival in Russia. The authors make correlations between Pharisaism as a personal phenomenon and Pharisaism at the institutional level. Based on this comparative analysis, the authors conclude that Pharisaism at the social level accompanies the process of institutionalization of religion.