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Dissent on the Margins
Emily B. Baran offers a gripping history of how a small, American-based religious community, the Jehovah's Witnesses, found its way into the Soviet Union after World War II, survived decades of brutal persecution, and emerged as one of the region's fastest growing religions after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. In telling the story of this often misunderstood faith, Baran explores the shifting boundaries of religious dissent, non-conformity, and human rights in the Soviet Union and its successor states. Soviet Jehovah's Witnesses are a fascinating case study of dissent beyond urban, intellectual nonconformists. Witnesses, who were generally rural, poorly educated, and utterly marginaliz...
To Make a Village Soviet
In June 1949 the Soviet state arrested seven farmers from the village of Bila Tserkva. Not wealthy or powerful, the men were unknown outside their community, and few had ever heard of their small, isolated village on the southwestern border of Soviet Ukraine. Nevertheless, the state decided they were dangerous traitors who threatened to undermine public order, and a regional court sentenced them to twenty-five years of imprisonment for treason. In To Make a Village Soviet Emily Baran explores why a powerful state singled out these individuals for removal from society. Bila Tserkva had to become a space in which Soviet laws and institutions reigned supreme, yet Sovietization was an aspiration...
Dissent on the Margins
Baran offers a compelling history of how a small, American-based religious community, the Jehovah's Witnesses, found its way into the Soviet Union after World War II, survived decades of fierce persecution, and emerged as one of the region's fastest growing religions after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. Through the story of this marginal, often misunderstood faith, this book explores the shifting boundaries of religious dissent, non-conformity, and human rights in the Soviet Union and the successor states of Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova.
Freedom and the Captive Mind
Freedom and the Captive Mind is a biography of Fr. Gleb Yakunin, the first Orthodox priest to adopt an ecumenical approach to Russian Orthodoxy, earning him the enmity of conservative groups within the Church and gratitude from other religious denominations. Father Yakunin believed the survival of the Church depended on its willingness to reform. When he was suspended, Yakunin continued to fight the system, working to expose the persecution of religious believers in the Soviet Union. After years of exile, Yakunin entered politics. He was criticized by religious authorities, denounced by nationalist politicians, and excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. As Wallace L. Daniel demonstrates, the letters Yakunin wrote and his revelations about the relationship between the Church hierarchy and the KGB stand as monuments of courage and the determination to reveal the truth about abuses of power and the authoritarian mindset that predominated in both institutions.
Unstuck in Time
Today's Russia, Unstuck in Time suggests, is a nation of time travelers, living either in memories of the Great Patriotic War and a society that provided for all its citizens or in an alternative future in which the USSR never collapsed. Eliot Borenstein examines the ways in which films, fiction, television, social media, political parties, and even theme parks use the conventions of time travel and alternate history to fantasize about narratives that are more appealing than the post-Soviet present. Unstuck in Time explores the centrality of an uncannily persistent USSR in the post-Soviet cultural imagination through deeply engaged and entertaining readings of an impressive array of texts: fantasies in which characters time-crash into the Soviet past, fictions of triumphant far-future Soviet societies, and real-life enterprises feeding the belief that the Soviet Union never ended. Whether channeled into benign nostalgia or dangerous mythmaking, the cases that Borenstein analyzes reveal the extent to which the psychic shock of the end of the Soviet Union left Russians adrift, caught between a past many still long for and a future few can imagine.
Jehovah’s Witnesses
What would happen if I accepted an invitation to Bible Study from Jehovah's Witnesses? What would attending a Kingdom Hall meeting involve? And if I invited door-knocking Witnesses into my home? This book introduces Jehovah's Witnesses without assuming prior knowledge of the Watch Tower organization. After outlining the Society's origins and history, the book explains their key beliefs and practices by taking the reader through the process of the seeker who makes initial contact with Witnesses, and progresses to take instruction and become a baptized member. The book then explores what is involved in being a Witness – congregational life, lifestyle, rites of passage, their understanding of the Bible and prophetic expectations. It examines the various processes and consequences of leaving the organization, controversies that have arisen in the course of its history, and popular criticisms. Discussion is given to the likelihood of reforms within the organization, such as its stance on blood transfusions, the role of women and new methods of meeting and evangelizing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Out of Obscurity
In the years since 1945, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown rapidly in terms of both numbers and public prominence. Mormonism is no longer merely a home-grown American religion, confined to the Intermountain West; instead, it has captured the attention of political pundits, Broadway audiences, and prospective converts around the world. While most scholarship on Mormonism concerns its colorful but now well-known early history, the essays in this collection assess recent developments, such as the LDS Church's international growth and acculturation; its intersection with conservative politics in recent decades; its stances on same-sex marriage and the role of women; and i...
Under Caesar's Sword
The first systematic global study of how Christians respond to persecution, presenting new research by leading scholars of global Christianity.
Limitations of Religious Freedom
Essays presented in this volume discuss `Othering': A Necessary but Dangerous Practice; Stages of religious oppression; Apologists of Anti-Pluralism; The Campaign Against Jehovah's Witnesses About Alleged Sexual Abuse in Belgium; Discrimination and Criminalization of Jehovah's Witnesses Through Generalized State Disinformation; The Use of Anti Terrorism Laws to Repress Minority Beliefs; From the French debate on `separatism' to the renewal of anti-cultism; Regulatory Restraints on Religious Freedom in the USA; Sharing Beliefs in Nepal.
A Sacred Space Is Never Empty
When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological c...
