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Drawing on multiple archives and primary sources, including secret police files and samizdat, Holy Sobriety in Modern Russia reconstructs the history of a spiritual movement that survived persecution by the Orthodox church and decades of official atheism, and still exists today. Since 1894, tens of thousands of Russians have found hope and faith through the teachings and prayers of the charismatic lay preacher and healer, Brother Ioann Churikov (1861–1933). Inspired by Churikov's deep piety, "miraculous" healing ability, and scripture-based philosophy known as holy sobriety, the "trezvenniki"—or "sober ones"—reclaimed their lives from the effects of alcoholism, unemployment, domestic a...
Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia traces the history of occult thought and practice from its origins in private salons to its popularity in turn-of-the-century mass culture. In lucid prose, Julia Mannherz examines the ferocious public debates of the 1870s on higher dimensional mathematics and the workings of seance phenomena, discusses the world of cheap instruction manuals and popular occult journals, and looks at haunted houses, which brought together the rural settings and the urban masses that obsessed over them. In addition, Mannherz looks at reactions of Russian Orthodox theologians to the occult. In spite of its prominence, the role of the occult in turn-of-the-century Russian culture has been largely ignored, if not actively written out of histories of the modern state. For specialists and students of Russian history, culture, and science, as well as those generally interested in the occult, Mannherz's fascinating study remedies this gap and returns the occult to its rightful place in the popular imagination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian society.
Studies in particular monastic revivals in the 19th and 20th centuries, as epitomized by Trinity-Sergius.
Orthodox Sisters explores the relationship between women, religion, and social, cultural, and economic change between 1700 and 1935 through the experiences of Orthodox convents in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese. Focusing primarily on the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross, William G. Wagner places the women's experiences in the broader context of developments in female monasticism and religious life in Russia, as well as in Europe and North America over the same period. This is the first comprehensive study that follows a Russian convent through all the stages of its life—from its origins in the eighteenth century to its flourishing at the turn of the twentieth century, to its resistance to ...
The theory of secularisation became a virtually unchallenged truth of twentieth-century social science. First sketched out by Enlightenment philosophers, then transformed into an irreversible global process by nineteenth-century thinkers, the theory was given substance by the precipitate drop in religious practice across Western Europe in the 1960s. However, the re-emergence of acute conflicts at the interface between religion and politics has confounded such assumptions. It is clear that these ideas must be rethought. Yet, as this distinguished, international team of scholars reveal, not everything contained in the idea of secularisation was false. Analyses of developments since 1500 reveal a wide spectrum of historical processes: partial secularisation in some spheres has been accompanied by sacralisation in others. Utilising new approaches derived from history, philosophy, politics and anthropology, the essays collected in Religion and the Political Imagination offer new ways of thinking about the urgency of religious issues in the contemporary world.
Europe in the nineteenth century saw spectacular growth in the size and number of cities and in the proportion of the population living in urban areas. Many contemporaries thought that this social revolution would bring about an equally dramatic change in religious life. This book, written by an international team of specialists, provides an authoritative account of religious change, both at the institutional and popular level, in Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox cities, in seven European countries.
This collection of essays on Russian religious thought focuses on the extent to which Russian culture and ideology has been informed by the nation's roots in Orthodox Christianity.
The present study fills a gap in the study of the evangelical movement in Russia by presenting a comprehensive picture of their compassionate ministry during their longest stretch of relative freedom before the 1980s. Better known for their energetic preaching and literature work, Russian evangelicals also gave attention to compassionate ministry, although it was never extensive because of their marginal status. They established assistance funds, organized charitable institutions, practiced urban rescue ministry, participated in the Russian temperance movement, and established economic communities. Each area is distinct, yet all were supported by the same set of theological convictions. The ...
This first comprehensive history of the Russian Bible demonstrates how scriptural translation exposed serious divisions in modern Russian religious culture.