Ethnicity And Religion In Central And Eastern Europe

Conceived as another chapter in the European history of religions (Europäische Religionsgeschichte), this book deals with the intense dynamics of the overlapping political, ethnic, and denominational constellations in Reformation and post-Reformation Transylvania. Navigating along multiple narrative tracks, and attempting to treat the religious history of an entire region over a limited time period in a differentiated, polyfocal way, the book represents a departure from the master narratives of any singularly oriented religious history. At the same time, the present work seeks to contribute to laying the groundwork at the micro- and meso-contextual level of East-Central European confessionalization processes, and to developing interpretive models for these processes in the region.

Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe examines how gender identities were reconfigured in a Bulgarian Muslim community following the demise of Communism and an influx of international aid from the Islamic world. Kristen Ghodsee conducted extensive ethnographic research among a small population of Pomaks, Slavic Muslims living in the remote mountains of southern Bulgaria. After Communism fell in 1989, Muslim minorities in Bulgaria sought to rediscover their faith after decades of state-imposed atheism. But instead of returning to their traditionally heterodox roots, isolated groups of Pomaks embraced a distinctly foreign type of Islam, which swept into their communities on the back of Saudi-financed international aid to Balkan Muslims, and which these Pomaks believe to be a more correct interpretation of their religion. Ghodsee explores how gender relations among the Pomaks had to be renegotiated after the collapse of both Communism and the region's state-subsidized lead and zinc mines. She shows how mosques have replaced the mines as the primary site for jobless and underemployed men to express their masculinity, and how Muslim women have encouraged this as a way to combat alcoholism and domestic violence. Ghodsee demonstrates how women's embrace of this new form of Islam has led them to adopt more conservative family roles, and how the Pomaks' new religion remains deeply influenced by Bulgaria's Marxist-Leninist legacy, with its calls for morality, social justice, and human solidarity.

This book presents research into inclusive education in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), written by scholars based in CEE. Inclusive education has become a framework for understanding and embracing diversity but most of the research in this area has been carried out in intercultural or culturally diverse settings within a relatively inclusive and open framework of democratic/liberal and multicultural Western societies. Unlike many Western societies, the realities of CEE countries are often much less diverse and connected with different fragile historical and political processes, which puts tackling sensitive topics in a different context. The editors and contributors address the dominant Western ways of looking at inclusive and global education in CEE. They argue that Western leveraged pedagogy has been imposed on CEE and outline the context-specific problems of teaching global education in CEE. Collectively, the chapters offer critical responses to the issues of exclusion and exclusionary practices of 'silenced' minorities in CEE. Written by academics based in Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary Poland, Romania and Russia, the book cover topics including Roma genocide in Poland, teaching about Islam and teaching about LGBTQ+ issues. The book includes a preface written by Jacqueline Bhabha, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, USA.

Ethnicity and religious confession are concepts around which discussion and controversy arise, generating emotions and feelings of extreme intensity. Each of us belongs to such a community. By default, there is pressure on us to be subjective. Intercultural dialogue can be successfully provided where a community that is aware of the Other comes to communicate, cooperate and build the structure of a multicultural society. Diversity throughout Central and South-Eastern Europe can lead to either cooperation or conflict. Presently, we face discrimination, marginalization, low-status minorities, peripheral societies and the inequitable distribution of resources that leads to unequal distribution of authority and power.

In Central and Eastern Europe religion is an important factor of public sphere. We argue that these societies develop their own social model of religion, which seem to be based on cultural religion, national churches and historical legacies. The latter is specifically observed in the perception of religious pluralism.

The multi-national region of Europe situated between the German-speaking lands and those of the former Soviet Union has witnessed many varied manifestations of nationalism over the last two centuries. Professor Sugar has been in the forefront of those seeking to understand and explain these Eastern European nationalisms, and eleven of his essays on the subject are included in this second selection of his studies. The first two essays deal with problems of ethnicity and its specific manifestations in the region; the next three present the growth of national antagonisms during the 19th century. The third, and longest, section then sets out to examine the interaction of fully developed nationalism in Eastern Europe with the various political movements and religious organizations that impacted upon these lands.

Bulgaria’s entangled Muslim and Orthodox Christian pasts still shape contemporary notions of identity, religion, and politics—and secularism—in unexpected ways. This book freshly looks at how these vital traditions come up against one another and the challenges of the world today.

The “bulwark” or antemurale myth—whereby a region is imagined as a defensive barrier against a dangerous Other—has been a persistent strand in the development of Eastern European nationalisms. While historical studies of the topic have typically focused on clashes and overlaps between sociocultural and religious formations, Rampart Nations delves deeper to uncover the mutual transfers and multi-sided national and interconfessional conflicts that helped to spread bulwark myths through Europe’s eastern periphery over several centuries. Ranging from art history to theology to political science, this volume offers new ways of understanding the political, social, and religious forces that continue to shape identity in Eastern Europe.