Religious Issues

ISSUES OF RELIGION ACROSS A VARIETY OF CEU PRESS PUBLICATIONS

This compilation features books of the Central European University Press, published since its establishment in 1993, that have some relevance to the issues of religion. After the latest release, titles in the backlist are arranged by content: contemporary topics are on top, older themes below. For more substantial information about the content and availability, please click on the covers of the book, or on the links inserted into the citations.

“The multitude of high-ranking church officials gathered in the Vatican complained to Pius XII so much and so bitterly about the Russians, and at the same time, the Moscow press attacked the Holy See so sharply, that His Holiness almost seemed to turn away from the tactic of modus vivendi.”—The Many Lives of a Jesuit, Freemason, and Philanthropist.
“Mindszenty remarked in his Memoirs that: ‘Pius stood with me until his death, and foiled every plot, intrigue and trick, initiated either by the Bolsheviks or by ‘progressive’ Catholics in their service.’”
“Nagy paints a vivid picture of what he witnessed in Santiago. Instead of sightseeing, his Chilean Jesuis hosts gave him a tour of the ‘wounds of society:’ slums, the hopelessness of the proletariat, the hungry, and impoverished children everywhere.”
“In rephrasing the Church’s teaching to advocate greater equality and social justice as well as his denunciation of the arms race, the new Pope John XXIII made a deeply positive impression on the Socialist camp.”

“The ban on the Uniate Church back in 1839 deprived the future Belarusian movement of its potentially active so­cial base, especially as religious identifications tended to be equated with national ones, where being Roman Catholic or Orthodox often meant being identified as Polish or Russian, respectively.”—Belarusian Nation-Building in Times of War and Revolution.
“The Catholic Church in the lands of Ober Ost was able to solidify its positions, since its priests did not abandon their congregations in the same manner as almost all of the Orthodox priests did, when they closed their churches and left the western provinces during the 1915 evacuation. As of spring 1916, there were no Orthodox priests avail­able to serve in the Białystok region.”
“Jews and Christians were not placed in the same units for labor duty, allowing Jews to follow their dietary rules and observe religious rites. Germans were primarily interested in achieving maximum labor efficiency from the exploited workers.”

“In 1781, the Protestant churches were granted freedom through the Edict of Toleration for the ‘Augsburg- and Helvetian’ confessions, which also benefited the Greek-Orthodox Church. Jews were also given an Edict of Toleration in 1783 that concerned both parts of the empire.”—Multicultural Cities of the Habsburg Empire.
Percentage of Lutherans in 1880 and 1910:
Nagyvárad 2.3 - 2.1
Pozsony 14.5 - 11.5
Szabadka 4.0 - 3.7
“The loyalty of the ecclesiastics was a characteristic of the Habsburg Monarchy; the established churches and their leaders were considered one of the pillars of the throne. In the case of a ‘national’ church like Orthodoxy, the extreme loyalty of priests could be considered a form of treason.”
Percentage of Jews in 1880 and 1910:
Arad 12.4 - 10.0
Brünn 7.4 - 7.1
Czernowitz 25.1 - 32.8
“Since Romanians had practically no political power, religious expression was a way to compensate for this. There was an obvious religious ‘race’ in Temesvár, fueled by the population growth of all faiths and languages. Churches were built or reconstructed in each suburb.”

“The 1929 Concordat between the Holy See and the Fascist regime meant a disaster for Slovenes and Croats in Venezia Giulia.”—Anti-Fascism in European History.
“Luca Pasetto was armed with direct powers from Pius XI. His task was to force the Archbishop of Gorizia, Francis Borgia Sedej, to resign and at the same time to inform the Slovene and Croatian clergy that any resistance to the regime was futile and unnecessary.”
“The deposition of the pro-Slovene Bishop of Trieste, himself a native of Friuli, Luigi Fogar was just as ‘discreet’ as in the case of Archbishop Sedej: through a special papal envoy, the Vatican also succeeded in obtaining his ‘voluntary resignation.’”
“Sophie and Hans Scholl and other members of the White Rose wrote and distributed anti-Nazi pamphlets; all of them were arrested and executed. The most important sources of inspiration and reinforcement for them were St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Thomas Aquinas, Blaise Pascal and Cardinal John Henry Newman.”

“The shortest definition of the icon, the cult image of the Eastern Orthodox Church could be that it is a kind of membrane, maybe even a window between the worlds of heaven and earth. The person standing in front of the icon can communicate with the depicted saint.”—An Older and More Beautiful Belgrade.
“Even the last Romanovs and many pretenders to the Russian throne before them commissioned portraits in the style of icons to appeal to the Russian people. In Soviet Russia, new potentates were well aware of how deeply rooted religion was in the people and it was natural to use some of the existing frameworks for political purposes.”
“In the late 1980s one could see pictures of Slobodan Milošević and religious icons next to each other on the dashboards of trucks and cars.”
“The motive to put a mobile phone in a tomb indirectly testifies to the re-paganization of Serbia which, at the transition to the third millennium, happened in the shadow of a publicly proclaimed return to religion and tradition.”

 

Books with religion in focus, contemporary topics on top, historical subjects below

In August 2002 two little girls from a village in Transcarpathia “saw the most beautiful white Lady. She was standing on a cloud, embellished with wonderful blossoms that did not touch the ground.”
The research about this Marian apparition provided a scholarly opportunity to explore its impact on the community, the stages of the erection of the pilgrimage site, the state of affairs in the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine. This is an anthropological analysis of the ways in which authority in religious field is created, legitimated, challenged and sustained. In particular, the book shows how the representatives of organizational religion deal with various kinds of challenges, especially in a situation when religiosity on a social and individual level is strong but the authority of the organizational religion is questioned by lay believers.
“There were some priests who fully realized the possible dangers of my work for the church, but embraced it anyway. I am very grateful to them for sharing with me their conviction that transparency should also apply to the church as an organization.”

The intransigent policy of Pius XII, characterized by an obsessive personal anti-Communism, had shown its limits. After the failure of the Hungarian insurrection in 1956 it was clear that these regimes were destined to remain for a long time.
The Hungarian regime needed, after the brutal repression of the revolution, to project a good image of itself at the international level. The Council convoked by Pope John XXIII only three months after his election was an opportunity to draw the country of its isolation and, in the long term, reinforce the goals of Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence.
The delegation of nine persons, two bishops, an apostolic administrator and their escort, were all carefully chosen and “briefed” before they left and strictly controlled by the Hungarian secret services at the Rome embassy. Their participation in the Second Vatican Council allowed for direct and secret negotiations between the Holy See and the Hungarian government which ended, in less than two years, with the signing of the famous agreement of September 1964, the first concrete results of the Vatican Ostpolitik.
Was the agreement more a success on the part of the regime or a success of the Church?

“Respect for the religious pluralism of Bosnia was in line with a tradition of religious tolerance in the Habsburg Empire dating back to the late eighteenth century.”—Making Muslim Women European.
Throughout the country the only possible marriage was a religious one, according to twelve different canonical legislations. Just in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there were six different legislations, administered by six different canonical courts—Islamic, Christian-Catholic, Christian-Orthodox, Sephardic-Jewish, Ashkenazi-Jewish and Evangelical respectively.”
“Considered to be the epitomal symbol of Muslim women’s sexual and religious segregation, the veiling practice was for the first time openly attacked, despised in the public eye, and even accused of being immoral and un-Islamic.”
“Religious officials of all faiths shared the belief that rapid social change—education, media, urbanization, consumption practices—posed a threat to religious institutions in their position as the supreme arbiter in society.”

“In the 12th century an important shift occurred in religious and cultural perspectives. The figure of the woman emerged as a new kind of cult object in secular culture in the literary convention of courtly love and in religion, parallel to this, in the triumphant cult of the Virgin Mary.”
The book contains documents born during the seven centuries that passed between the Hungarian royal princess Margarets premature death and her canonization. The hagiographic corpus—Latin texts with English translation—begins with the Oldest Legend from 1275-1277 and ends with documents of the 15th century canonization attempt.
“Considering the hairshirt she wore of little value, she had prepared for herself hedgehog skins three or four fingers wide. She girded herself with these, putting all of the spines on the skins next to her naked flesh.” (Nam cilicium, quo utebatur, parvi pendens pelles ericinas, secretius sibi parari fecit trium vel quattuor digitorum latitudine et universisa spinis pellium circa carnem ipsam nudam seipsam cinxit eisdem.)

“Royal sainthood was a typical and original feature of the cult of saints among recently converted ‘barbarians.’ True, some of the obligatory elements of the activity of rulers made it difficult for the church to recognize a ruler’s life as an exemplary model of sainthood.”—The Sanctity of the Leaders.
Iussit ut decem villarum populus ęcclesiam edificaret, ad cuius diocesim pertineret, ne tedio affectus minus re­ligionis sue officium curaret. Quibus secundum vite meritum epis­copos et sacerdotes prefecit.” - He or­dered that the people of ten villages should erect one church and belong to its parish, lest they be overcome by weariness and show less care for their religious duties. Over them he appointed bishops and priests according to the merits of their lives.”
“The cult of Saint Stanislaus completes the image of the medieval bishop as pastor bonus: he administered the church entrusted to him ‘with utmost dedication’ and justice, not tolerating any sinful transgression, not even those coming from the king’s milieu.”

Other titles from the backlist with relevance to religion, contemporary topics on top, historical themes below:

“Contrary to many assumptions, under communism the bond between religion and nation in Poland grew stronger” – from a collection of essays on current Polish politics.
“Poland continues to be one of the most intensely religious countries in the western world: nearly 90 percent of Poles call themselves Catholic, a majority consider themselves practicing Catholics, and nearly half attend Mass regularly.”
“Religion plays a deeply embedded symbolic function in most people’s lives. Such ritualistic observance is discursively linked to Polish national identity, resulting in a heterosexual, male-centered ideal of ethno-religious purity.”
“The Church sustains its own balancing act in a Polish society that is slowly declining in religiosity among younger people but yet still holds tight the hand that has guided the nation for so long. PiS (Kaczynski’s party) may, at times, sound like the political wing of the Church in Poland.”

“The Church emerged from the communist era as a strong, respected, and popular institution. These historical factors also help explain a steadily high level of religiosity, one of the highest in Europe”—from a book on current values in Poland.
“The Church, while regarding homosexual relations sinful, treats gays and lesbians as suffering people who can be helped to overcome their affliction. At the same time, the bishops have spoken out against same-sex marriage or any other form of legal recognition of same-sex unions and have regarded LGBT activism as an aggressive promotion of homosexuality.”
“The majority of Poles have no issue with religion in schools, religious symbols in public places, priests at state ceremonies or on TV, and being informed by the Church hierarchy on moral issues.”

“Contrary to popular belief, the church has not been a system-defining institution but rather a system-covering ideological robe of the Russian regime.”—taken from the momentous endeavor of analyzing post-communist regimes.
“A ‘client church’ is a religious organization which is dependent in its workings on the state. It is recognized on a discretional basis, and its primary function is campaigning for the ruling elite and offer ideological (religious) cover for its actions. The state can be labelled a hypocrite state for it uses religion as a political tool.”
“Practically, the Church in Poland acts like an interest group that is influential in both politics and society. In contrast, the Church in today’s Hungary is a patronal-policy ally of Orbán, a link that is businesslike in a very secular way.
What distinguishes church-state relations is what fundamentally distinguishes their regimes: Kaczyński is an ideology-driven populist, while Orbán is an ideology-applying populist.”

“An open society must find a way to accommodate, incorporate, and include the widest possible variable of religious and secular beliefs, but toleration is not an obligation to respect all opinions and beliefs equally, but rather an obligation to accord equal respect to persons.”
The history, achievements and failures of the open society concept re-examined.
“Religion involves two elements. One is the religious impulse; the other is identification. These two things are linked because sacred things—objects, books, buildings—have two important features for believers. One is that they point towards the transcendent. The second is that these sacred objects bind people together in and across time with others who have shared their history.”
“Identification means that for most religious believers, the world divides into two: there are people of your kind, and there are people who are not of your kind. This can be one of the most difficult aspects of religion to incorporate within an open society.”

“Some of the intellectual milieus that had existed since the 1990s or early 2000s were associated with the Russian Orthodox Church, its conservative and anti-Western elements and can therefore be loosely typified as religious traditionalist articulations.”—from a book on how Russia is being constructed as a supranational entity
“Recycling the Brezhnevite cult of the Great Patriotic War, the post-Soviet elites added some new elements such as the Orthodox Church—a theme silenced by the Soviet ideological practice. The authorities focused on the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the victory, glorifying the role of the Red Army as well as the Russian Orthodox Church.”
“The symbolism that is constructed in the Patriarch’s speech at the opening of the Sixteenth World Russian People’s Council in 2012 links the spatial borders to spiritual borders and equates present-day Western cultural influence with historical instances of territorial invasions that arrived from the West.”

“It may seem odd that in Poland, despite ranking as the most religious country in terms of day-to-day devotion to faith, no connection could be detected between religiosity and the rejection of strangers. In the model country of secularization, France, however, the opposite was the case!”—Nation and Migration.
“In the Mediterranean and Central European countries religion and descent mattered but only showed a moderate significance for national identity. In contrast, Russians and Turks stressed religion and descent as key aspects of national identity.”
“Religious intolerance became more intense as anti-immigrant political parties gained traction in several countries. This may be explained in part by strategy of some political leaders and movements to mix terrorism with migration, and migrants and refugees with terrorists.”
“Members of the non-Muslim majority regard Muslim immigrants with fear and apprehen­sion, accusing them of terrorist sympathies, unequal treatment of women, and religious intolerance.“

"The communists’ objective was not to eliminate Islam or religion in general from society. Rather, religion was supposed to lose its power over the population gradually, through the social progress achieved by means of economic modernization and education.”—from the collection of essays on the afterlife of 1989.
“Young people, primarily men, began to challenge the authority of local mullas and elders as the guarantors of the ruling order—Islam. This seemingly ideological dispute then translated into grave social conflict, which materialized outside of the Soviet political system.”
“According to Rev. Neuhaus, a leading intellectual in the New Religious Right, American democracy depends for its health and survival on Judeo-Christian religion. If that religion deteriorates, the ethos of American democracy will collapse… Breitbart replaced First Things as the movement’s journalistic beacon.”

“Political elites and members of the oligarchic class of southeastern Ukraine have begun to take religion seriously, and to consider Orthodoxy as the core of a regional identity that conflates elements of ‘all-Russian,’ Soviet, and Cossack identities.”—from the book on regional specificities in Ukraine.
“The intensity of religious sentiment concerning eternal life, the soul, the devil and the like, are highest among the historically repressed groups, the Protestant denominations, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and Roman Catholics.”
“One-third of all believers define themselves as ‘just Orthodox’ and 13% as ‘believers without a confession.’ They profess allegiance to a faith tradition and yet feel a negligible allegiance to a particular denomination or parish.”
“Religious beliefs and practices contribute toward forging local and national identities, but they are not particularly effective, whether in historical or contemporary terms, in providing the underpinnings for regionally based identities and political projects.”

Gorbachev said that many find the ritual, ceremonial part of religion attractive. However, true believers are dying out with the older generation. Still, one third of the population marry and baptize their children in the church.  
As for Khomeini, Reagan said, he felt that both countries—the U.S. and the USSR—born of revolution, ought to keep an eye on another revolution which teaches that the way to heaven is to kill a non-believer.” (Geneva, 1985 November)
Conversations of superpower leaders at the end of the Cold War, now in paperback.
Gorbachev said that the Soviets judged the problem of religion as not a serious one. There were not big problems with freedom of worship. He, himself, had been baptized, but was not now a believer and that reflected a certain evolution of Soviet society. (Moscow 1988 May).
Reagan said he hoped the Church would win. Filaret concluded the meeting by saying that Christ would win. (Danilov Monastery, 1988 May)

Gorbachev: As for religious issues, we treat them within the framework of our general understanding of universal human values. It is up to the individual which philosophy and religion to practice.
John Paul II: I think we understood correctly that the strength of perestroika is in its soul. You are right when you say that changes should not come too fast. We also agree that not only structures need to be changed, but the thinking as well. (Vatican, 1989 December)—from Gorbachev and Bush, also in paperback.
Gorbachev: Dangers arise from the transitional situation in the USSR. We’re leaving behind one system of values. We see how the legitimate desire for national self-determination has negative implications: nationalism, separatism, sometimes with religious overtones. A balanced approach is needed; we have a unique responsibility.
Mitterrand: The USSR needs serious, sensible assistance. (London, 1991 July)

“Unlike Kundera or Samuel P. Huntington, Halecki, an expert on Christian history and doctrine, said that from the point of view of religious doctrine and even of ecclesiastical organization, the differences between Protestantism and both Catholicism and Orthodoxy are much greater than those which separate the two latter.”—from the book on keys to economic development.
“Topolski characterized the region according to its civilizational and cultural features associated with the dominant religion. East Central Europe was restricted to the Catholic countries, where the introduction of feudal institutions was delayed and where in the sixteenth century serfdom re-emerged.”

“The first group in the Soviet Bloc that understood the potential of human rights arguments was the Catholic Church in Poland. In the early 1960s, the Polish Church invoked its members’ individual rights to religious freedom to demand that it be allowed to conduct religious instruction in state schools.”—from a bunch of most stirring responses to the inquiry of the Eurozine online magazine about the current state of East-West relations.
“Given the dissidents’ rejection of ideology and their commitment to an objective truth, their writings often had strongly religious connotations. This is most obvious in the case of Solzhenitsyn or Catholic activists like Tadeusz Mazowiecki in Poland and Václav Benda in Czechoslovakia.”
“The lesson of Tunisia, and perhaps more recent Algerian developments, is that religious parties can be incorporated into mainstream politics, but only with a strong civil society determined to prevent rollback.”

“Within the Charter 77 movement, a small but in­fluential group of Protestant activists represented the most distinct non-Marxist roots of the new human rights-oriented oppositional strategy. They came mostly from an informal group of younger theologians and noncon­formists in relation to the regime, as well as their own Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren structures.”—Making Sense of Dictatorship.
“The social movements of Latin America were an attractive model, particularly the ‘Marxist priests’ who defended the rights of the exploited and the poor, which Hungarian readers typically understood as a pro­test against local oligarchies and American monopolies. Enthusiastic about Vatican II, they were eager to recreate committed Catholic communities.”
“The Movement for Defense of Human and Civil Rights (ROPCiO), led by Leszek Moczulski and Andrzej Czuma, represented the center-right opposition closer to the Catholic Church. The defense of religious rights played a far bigger role in its activities.”

“The PAX Association never involved all of the Polish right; many of them perceived it to be an outpost of the secret police, an instrument of infiltration and diversion. It was also approached with caution by the Catholic Church hierarchs.”—Reassessing Communism.
“From the 1970s onward, it was this very religion and Church that loaned its language and categories to the intellectual discourse of the nascent democratic opposition, which were surprisingly easily adopted also by the earlier revisionists.” 
In September 1945, the decree on Marital Law was adopted, introducing the institutions of civil marriage and divorce. Not only did it make life easier for citizens who wanted to regulate their legal situation as quickly as possible, but it also stripped the Catholic Church of its erstwhile privileged position when it came to decisions regarding their public status.”

“Italians who in the course of their retreat or during the davai marches found shelter in the izbas scattered along the way were amazed to find that, in the country of communism and atheism, such dwellings had small altars and icons lit up with candles.”—the story of Italian prisoners of war in the USSR.
“In 1942, the autocephalous Russian Orthodox Church was entirely rehabilitated. The metropolitan of Moscow Sergei was given some freedom of action, and almost all the bishops detained in the camps were released.”
“On 4 September 1943, Sergei and two other met­ropolitans—Aleksy of Leningrad and Nikolai of Kiev—were received by Stalin, who authorized them to organize the appointment of the patriarch, whose seat had been vacant since 1926. Stalin further allowed churches and a certain number of seminaries to be reopened.”
“In occupied Ukraine, masses held in celebration of the Italian troops had wide participation among local civilians; the chaplains received many requests for children’s baptisms.”

“During WWI, the Vatican focused its attention on the YMCA’s activities as it felt that through relief there was an attempt at converting people to Protestantism. In November 1920, the Vatican condemned the YMCA on the grounds that it undermined the faith of Catholics.”—Ireland's Helping Hand to Europe.
“Catholic and Protestant Churches wanted to play a main role in the reconstruction of society. They saw the postwar period as a golden opportunity to bring back Europe to the Christian fold.”
“Giovanni Battista Montini (future Pope Paul VI) was less of a radical and by Stalin’s death in 1953, he wondered if direct confrontation was still the best approach with the communists. It was with Montini that the Irish authorities would frequently deal when discussing relief.”
“Certain members of the hierarchy resisted and became known as ‘martyr cardinals’. They were Jozsef Mindszenty from Hungary, Stefan Wyszyński from Poland, Alojzije Stepinac from Croatia, Josef Beran from Czechoslovakia, and Josyf Slipyj from Ukraine.”

“Where the anarchists and, originally, the Soviet communists wanted to eradicate religion altogether, the Fascists and Nazis sought to harness religion and either tame it (in Italy) or redesign it to accord with Nazi ideology (in the Third Reich)”—from the book on modern non-democracies.
“The Bolsheviks’ preferred method was to dispatch a group of officials to a monastery to prove that relics thought to be the bones of saints were actually animal bones mixed with wax.”
“One of Mussolini’s first steps was to reassure the Vatican. He authorized religious education under the supervision of religious authorities, banned contraception, and introduced penalties for cursing in public.”
“Hitler ridiculed Himmler’s declarations in favor of reviving polytheism and Goebbels shut down cultic sites which had been set up to serve as places for neopagan rituals. They believed that Christianity would ultimately serve much better than paganism as a foundation for redesigning human nature.”

“Modern Protestant ‘pre-millennialism’ ex­pects Jesus to return before the millennium to destroy Antichrist and his agents in the battle of Armageddon, and then to found the king­dom of the saints (millennium). Here humanity has a passive role, largely limited to penitence and preaching.”
From a collection of essays on the apocalypse.
“Cataclysmic apocalyptic scenarios foresee enormous destruction preceding the advent of the God’s kingdom. Transformational apocalyptic scenarios emphasize the voluntary and peaceful change of humanity. "
“Eighteenth-cen­tury Hasidism and the later Central European Jewish thinkers moved in a similar direction, insofar as apocalypticism was concerned.”
“Leaders of Salafi-jihadism, in­cluding Osama bin Laden and Dr. Ayman al-Zawāhiri, have been re­luctant to cite overtly apocalyptic traditions. Globalist radical Mus­lims also usually avoid the trap of closely dating the end of the world.”

Jewish life in Belarus in the years after World War II was long an enigma. Officially it was held to be as being non-existent, and in the ideological atmosphere of the time research on the matter was impossible. For more than half a century the truth about Jewish life during this period was sealed in inaccessible archives. The Jews of Belarus preferred to keep silent rather than expose themselves to the animosity of the authorities. Although the fate of Belarusian Jews before and during the war has now been amply studied, this book is one of the first attempts to study Jewish life in Belarus during the last decade of Stalin's rule.
The book is a celebration of the stubbornly courageous attempts by surviving Belarusian Jews to preserve their Jewish religious and cultural identity in the face of the Soviet regime’s concerted effort to suppress Jewish religion and identity, as well as any explicit references to the annihilation of over 80 percent of Jewish Belarusians during the Holocaust. 

The history of eugenics is still a taboo subject in some countries’ national histories. This is partly true for Portugal, which lends special value to this monograph.
The book examines the science and ideology of eugenics in early twentieth century Portugal in the context of manifestations in other countries in the same period. Instead of a racially-oriented program of eugenics developed in ‘pagan’ Nazi Germany, Salazar promoted pronatalist policies that were more interested in the population quantity than quality, and which took the family as the unit of political, social and human reproduction.
The author identifies that three factors that ultimately limited the impact of eugenics in Portugal: a low level of institutionalization, opposition from Catholics, and the conservative nature of the Salazar regime. And three expressions, to which the eugenic science and movement were confined in Portugal: individualized studies on mental health; a particular stance on racial miscegenation in the context of the substantial Portuguese colonial empire; and a diffuse model of social hygiene, maternity care and puericulture. 

“Hrdlička felt that scientific principles must replace traditional beliefs as a guide to living. Eugenics fulfilled this quest by purporting to distill useful precepts directly from biology without deferring to traditional religion.”—The Perils of Race-Thinking.
“Not only was Christianity considered old-fashioned in general, but Christian universalism stood in the way of a world organized more ‘naturally’ around race. Many public figures authoritatively preached, using the rhetoric of science, that the ‘facts’ of race nullified the superstition of Christianity.”
“For Hrdlička, Christianity was ‘backwards’ and oppressive because it stifled authentic expressions of ‘natural’ racial characteristics. In Eastern Europe, Christianity was a foreign ploy, imposed mostly by Germans, for suppressing Slavic identity.”
“When tested, post-Christian, science-based morality did not work out well; race and nation animated the ‘religious wars’ of the modern age.”

Did Masaryk really intend to start a new religion? This book looks at Tomáš Masaryk’s personal religious philosophy, his desire to establish that set of beliefs as the civil religion of Czechoslovakia, and his disappointment at seeing the failure of those efforts.
The new religion would be freed from churches and doctrines, Masaryk insisted that it would better allow people to act in love and service. On becoming president, he expected that this new religion would be accepted by all Czechs; it would provide the unifying conviction that would inspire them to civic engagement, much as he understood the function of religion in America.
The second subject is Slovene architect Jože Plečnik, whom Masaryk commissioned in 1921 to direct the renovation of Prague Castle. Catholic imagery fired his imagination: yet he also believed that all architecture was sacral, whether a church or the home of a noble patron.
Alice Garrigue Masaryková (1879–1966), Masaryk’s eldest child, is the third character in the book. The founding director of the Czechoslovak Red Cross organization, Masaryková sought to bridge religious conviction with social scientific analysis and democratic civic engagement. 

“The Exarchate has the three components which build the state institutionally—territory, nation, and power. The Church Movement itself, whose greatest achievement is the Exarchate, is religious only in its form, but in its essence it is political. ”—from the collection of excerpts from studies over the precommunist period by younger scholars of the region.
“The ‘Great Church’ was hostile to any movement that would challenge its own authority over the hearts and minds of the faithful as well as the legitimacy of Ottoman rule in general. This revises the perception of this institution as an agent of Greek nationalism.”
“The reckless actions of the gendarme toward the Catholic clergy harmed the general perception of the country, even though the official policies clearly stood against this kind of abuse. It was an example of the disrespect that emerges when primitive masses have power in their grasp, rather than attack against the church or religion.”

“The Carnegie Commission Report owed much to the tradition of philanthropic endeavors made by other American organizations, especially for persecuted Christians in the Ottoman Empire and Jews in the Balkan states.”—Philanthropy, Conflict Management, and International Law.
“Christian soldiers (Greeks, Bulgarians, and Armenians) in the Ottoman army complained of constant abuse by their Muslim superiors. On the other hand, the inclusion of Christians in the army inevitably destroyed the belief that Islam is the one and only moral bond between the state and the army.”
“Belgrade’s leading daily Politika reported on a ‘massacre in a mosque’ by the Bulgarian army that was followed by the forced Christianization of Turkish Muslims.’
“The Carnegie Report condemned the actions of Serbia’s army and auxiliary. Accounts of near daily-acts of mismanagement, rape, terror, and nationalist-religious chauvinism sullied the reputation of the Serbian army and government.”

“Curiously, by the reviewer for Dziennik Łodzki, Buddhism was not perceived as a pagan religion testifying to the barbarian state of people. Contrary to the missionary tradition of the previous centuries, which treated Buddhism as idolatrous and deceptive worship of ‘Fo’, the written tradition of religion was stressed.”—Staged Otherness.
“Unlike the Siberian Ostyaks, the Samoyeds could not even create religion for themselves; they have neither shamans nor healers. All Samoyeds being (at least formally) Christians had to have Russian names.”
“In 1930, the researchers of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Leningrad organized an exhibition about religions. The method of the exhibition was, in accordance with Marxist-Leninist evolutionary theory, a unilinear scale, wherein such terms as magic, animism, and totemism were followed by shamanism. This exhibition was the basis from which the Museum of the History of Religion was organized.”

“In the pre-modern peasant conception, illness was not simply a (humoral or physiological) disorder of the body, but the outcome of divine punishment or the result of a magic spell. In the peasant world, healers were omnipotent.”—from a monograph on health conditions in the Romanian Old Kingdom.
“All the members of the medical corps who treated nutrition in their writings vituperated against religious fasting, often in very aggressive terms.”
“Between 1868 and 1901, the number of fast days appears to have mysteriously increased. As if the large number of fast days was not enough, some of the fast periods, for example Lent, occurred at a sensitive time in the farming calendar: late winter and early spring, with the capricious weather of March and April, just as the agricultural season was about to start.”
“I found men and women who told me that they would rather see their infants die than damn their souls by giving them milk or eggs during fast days.”

“The Church has always differentiated between the phenomena of concrete, bodily possession (possessio) and being under the influence of a spirit or demon (obsessio, circumsessio); this type of possession is not concrete and personal.”—Spirit Posession.
“The claim that the healings also converted many of the possessed (and onlookers) helped the case of the Franciscan and the Church authorities sanctioned the continuation of the rituals under controlled circumstances.”
“The official doctrines regarding Satan changed over time in both the Western and the Eastern churches and remained malleable even in the modern period; indeed, the reality and mode of existence of the devil is still subject to theological debate today.”
“Christian self-identification does not prevent people from practicing one of the popular religious traditions of Brazil at the same time. The Afro-Brazilian religions as well as Spiritism usually embrace the notion of the Christian God as creator and offer a link to Christianity.”

“An Ottoman speaking and writing Arabic, Osmanlıca and Persian, to a degree saw these three as different varieties of the same unitary Islamic literacy expressed in ‘holy’ Arabic letters.”—Words in Space and Time.
“The Balkan nation-states were founded on an ethnoreligious base during the 19th century. However, they were gradually reshaped in line with the ethnolinguistic definition of the nation.”
“Serbo-Croatian had to be split in order to provide each post-Yugoslav nation-state with its own unique and unshared national language. However, these new languages are almost identical.”
“In Japan people tend to celebrate the birth of a child with a Shinto ceremony, marriage in a Christian-style church wedding, while opting for a Buddhist funeral.”
“China as the world’s sole example of a civilization coterminous with a religion (Confucianism, or now Chinese-style communism) and writing system that was successfully turned into a nation-state. The Russian governing elite openly aspires to emulate the Chinese model.”

“The Church in the West promoted the mixing of the races in a wholly different sense than the religions of the East. Max Weber has indicated the far-reaching consequences of the Christian principle of common meals which St. Paul introduced when he did not shrink from eating with the uncircumcised at Antioch.”—from The Rise of Comparative History
“The Orthodox Slavs are more united than the Slavs in general. Furthermore, their closeness in faith and rituals with non-Slavic Orthodox communities often seemed more profound than the slightly vague all-Slavic solidarity. As opposed to this, Catholic Slavs have always proudly confirmed their ties with the Latin West.”
“In the Romanian provinces, the bishop’s influence is rather feeble on the rural clergy. The Catholic priest would have been under the direct control of his bishop. Village autonomy regarding religion would have disappeared. The whole past of the peasants’ way of religious life, an extremely powerful way of life, escaping all constraints, would have been buried.”

“The process of decline which began in 1204 only affected Byzantinism’s cultural aspects. The religious aspect remained vigorous and creative. The Church emerged as the heir to Byzantinism’s culture.”—Byzantium after the Nation
“The internal unity of the trinitarian model is related to every aspect of material life. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are transformed into Power (the monarchy’s authority), Love (the Church as the body of Christ), and Wisdom: a version of the Augustinian perception of the trinitarianism.”
“The Habsburgs behaved harshly towards the Orthodox populations of Transylvania and Bukovina, inspired by the 18th-century centralist spirit of ‘enlightened monarchy.’ This was not aimed at their conversion to Catholicism; rather the Habsburgs aimed at assimilating the Orthodox into the Uniate Church.”
“The Czechs’ clash with official Catholicism and the Bulgarians’ distancing themselves from the institutional expression of Orthodox Christianity were steps in a process of secularization.”

“The dominant faith in Poland under August III was, and is until now, Roman Catholicism. The second, existing from time immemorial—and Poland is full of its adherents—is Judaism. A third, recently imported from Turkey, is that of the Karaim. The fourth faith is Lutheranism, and the fifth Calvinism.”—as broadcast from the 18th century.
“The flagellants are people who whip themselves in public in repentance of their sins, whether out of contrition or as commanded by a priest at confession. Some flagellants apply the whips with such practiced skill and force that they hit raw flesh and tear up scarlet strips, splattering their gown, caps, and the church floor with blood. The whipping lasts about a quarter of an hour.”
“Pupils became infected upon completing their education, having read the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, Spinoza, and other godless writers. In sum, deism became disseminated in Poland by teachers, by young men sent abroad for their education, and by books.”

“At the beginning it did not make much difference whether the institutional models in the region of the ‘new barbarians’ derived from the West or from Byzantium, since the state of Kiev absorbed at least as much influence from the Normans as it did from the Byzantines.”—The Historical Construction of National Consciousness.
“In the Western ceremony the vassal would place his hands into the clasped hands of his lord, and the new affiliation was finally sealed with a mutual kiss. The Church borrowed the Western posture for prayer of clasped hands from the vassalage ceremony (the Christians of Ancient Rome had turned to God with outstretched arms).”
“The emergence of the stricter, reformed branch of the Order of Friars Minor (the Observants) was originally a conservative reform intended to restore the original strictness of the Franciscan Rule and the faltering religious life, and more broadly the shaky authority of the Church.”

“To the Arpadian kings, the terms ‘East and West,’ ‘Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy,’ ‘Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ used by modern historiography for a compartmentalization of historical reality, would have simply made no sense… The legacy of open-minded spiritual interaction between Greeks and Latins was not lost on Princess Piroska.”—from the book on the Christ Pantokrator, the second largest Byzantine religious edifice after Hagia Sophia still standing in Istanbul.
“Christian ideals formed not only Piroska’s identity, but also Eirene’s imperial image in Constantinople, where she associated herself with the Theotokos and had herself represented as re-enacting the virtues of the Mother of God.”

“Martyrdom is one of the most controversial and incomprehensible phenomena of early Christianity. In the Roman Empire which, as we know, was quite tolerant in religious matters a great number of people (though much less than suggested by ancient sources) succeeded in dying for their religious convictions. Our feelings about this can be very different: we may admire the unbending courage and heroism of the martyrs or be irritated by their stubbornness, or even feel disgusted at the fanaticism with which they strove for death. But whatever our feelings may be, we must admit that a very strong motivation is needed to accept voluntarily or even seek death (and, in the majority of cases, a very painful death at that). Martyrs sacrifice themselves to God, as it is often stated in their acts. And even if the language used by the martyrologists is often metaphorical the sacrifices are real and those who die in this way are human beings.”
Isaac, Iphigeneia, Ignatius investigates martyrdom as a (voluntary) human sacrifice. 

Lives, identities, cults, landscapes and tombs – it is in this arrangement that the memories of the transition from paganism to Christianity are discussed, based on latest archeological discoveries from the last centuries of the Roman Empire.
Most of the essays subscribe to a conception of smoother processes than the earlier scholarly consensus. Such a paradigm shift in the interpretation of the relations between ‘pagans’ and ‘Christians’ attempts to replace the old ‘conflict model’ with a subtler, complex approach by triggering new explanatory models such as multiculturalism, cohabitation, cooperation, identity, or group cohesion.
“While paganism had never been fully extirpated or denied by the multiethnic educated elite that managed the Roman Empire, Christianity came to be presented by the same elite as providing a way for a wider group of people to combine true philosophy and right religion. For a long time afterwards, pagans and Christians lived in between polytheistic and monotheist traditions and disputed Classical and non-Classical legacies.” This is the coexistence of various religious cultures that this book seeks to explore.

Further titles on religious themes from the CEU Press backlist:: 

  • Denial and repression of anti-semitism: post-communist remembrance of a Serbian bishop; 
  • Memories, rites and history of a Jewish community in a Central European metropolis; 
  • International comparative research of verbal magic spanning from the Atlantic to the Black Sea; 
  • Shamans, magic lore, witchcraft and the devil across Europe in three volumes on demons, spirits and witches; 
  • The conversion policies in the Russian empire, the fate of the Greek-Catholic Church in the Polish-Lithuanian Confederation, efforts to bring back a heretic Czech denomination to the mainstream, and similar themes on friars, nobles and burghers.