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This book opens a new research field in Balkan contextual theology. By embracing culturally rich traditions of the Western Balkans as its starting point, it explores their existential and theological bearings. Placed at the crossroads of civilisations and religions, this region has witnessed some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. At the same time, it has produced unique textures of inter-cultural life. The volume addresses some of the most poignant phenomena endemic to the region, such as sevdalinka music, intimate forms of neighborhood, archetypes of ‘sacred warriors,’ the experience of democratic jet lag, collective melancholy, and intergenerational trauma. As the first book of this nature, it aims to encourage further development of contextual theological thinking in the region and promote its international reception.
This book presents state-of-the-art discussions around the concentration camp Jasenovac. Initially one of the largest camps of the Second World War, Jasenovac became a symbol of supra-national unity during the Yugoslav period and in the 1990s re-emerged as a contested symbol of narrational victimhood. By analyzing some of the most controversial topics related to the Second World War in south-eastern Europe – the Holocaust, the genocide of Serbs and Roma, the issues of political prisoners and state-sponsored crimes, censorship during Communist Yugoslavia, the use of memory in war propaganda, and representation of tragedies in museums and art – the book allows for a greater understanding of the development of intergroup violence in the former Yugoslavia. It will be of interest to scholars and students of history, genocide studies, memory studies, and sociology as well as professionals working in the field of conflict resolution and reconciliation.
Christian Orthodox Migrants in Western Europe: Secularization and Modernity through the Lens of the Gift Paradigm explores a religious community that has been getting increasing scholarly attention. While most of the literature in the field looks at this religious tradition in terms of its alleged inability to come to terms with modernity – due to its specific religious institutions, practices and dogma – this book takes a step back from such Western-centered and Protestant-biased analysis of religion. It addresses Orthodoxy’s recent encounter with the West, modernity and secularization in the process of post-communist migrations from Eastern Europe, revealing the complicated identity ...
This volume suggests a model of collective memory that distinguishes between two conceptual logics of memory fragmentation: vertical fragmentation and horizontal fragmentation. It offers a series of case studies of conflict and post-conflict collective memory, shedding light on the ways various actors participate in the production, dissemination, and contestation of memory discourses. With attention to the characteristics of both vertical and horizontal memory fragmentation, the book addresses the plurality of diverging, and often conflicting, memory discourses that are produced within the public sphere of a given community. It analyzes the juxtaposition, tensions, and interactions between n...
This book discusses the evolution of state governance of Islam and the nature and forms of local Muslims’ rediscovery of their ‘Muslimness’ across post-communist Eurasia. It examines the effects on the Islamic scene of the political and ideological divergence of Central and South-Eastern Europe from Russia and most of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Of particular interest are the implications of the proliferation of new, ‘global’ interpretations of Islam and their relationship with existing ‘traditional’ Islamic beliefs and practices. The contributions in this book address these issues through an interdisciplinary prism combining history, religious studies/theology, social anthr...
The Boyash, also known as Rudari, Lingurari or, inclusively, as “oamenii noștri” (our people), are an ethnic group living today in scattered communities in the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, but also in the Americas. What brings the disperse communities of Boyash together is their Romanian mother tongue, (memory of) traditional occupation, common historical origin, and the fact that the majority population considers them Gypsies / Roma. A marginal topic until now, at the crossroads between Romani and Romanian studies, the Boyash studies are today an interdisciplinary field dealing with the experiences of the Boyash over time, in Romania and all the places where they have settled. The editors of this volume intend to mark two centuries of scholarly interest in the Boyash by bringing together researchers from different fields, summing up existing literature and bringing new research to the forefront.
Populism is a buzzword. This compilation explores the significance of religion for the controversies stirred up by populist politics in European and American contexts in order to understand what lies behind the buzz. Engaging Jewish, Christian, and Islamic political thought and theology, contributions by more than twenty established and emerging scholars explore right-wing and left-wing protests, offering critical interpretations and creative interventions for a polarized public square. Both methodologically and thematically, the compilation moves beyond essentialist definitions of religion, encouraging a comparative approach to political theology today. Ulrich Schmiedel and Joshua Ralston discuss their book on Brill's Humanities Matter podcast available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.
This book examines the economics of everyday life and the Final Solution in Southeastern Europe, specifically the role that the mass confiscation of Jewish property and exclusion of Jews as well as other undesired population groups from the national marketplace in Southeastern Europe played in transforming economic life and social relations. It aims to understand how ordinary people in the region responded as beneficiaries, bystanders, perpetrators, rescuers, and, above all, victims to Aryanization, and how regimes and governments adapted its basic principles to their specific national contexts and ideological and ethnic agendas. Aryanization appeared in some of its most radical, accelerated...
This book explores local cultural discourses and practices relating to manifestations and experiences of the demonic, the spectral and the uncanny, probing into their effects on people’s domestic and intimate spheres of life. The chapters examine the uncanny in a cross-cultural manner, involving empirically rich case studies from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Europe. They use an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to show how people are affected by their intimate interactions with spiritual beings. While several chapters focus on the tensions between public and private spheres that emerge in the context of spiritual encounters, others explore what kind of relationships betwe...
Why does doing your job feel so flooded and so pointless at the same time? Nobody knows better than millennial and Gen Z professionals how rapid technological development has inundated post-pandemic work. Organizational researcher Craig Mattson listens to their stories and builds a framework for coping with digital overwhelm at work. This book won’t tell you to declutter your digital life or to end capitalism now. But what you can do, suggests Professor Mattson, is change how you attend to zones where technological disruption meets emotional pressure. Calling these zones modes of communication, this book urges you to practice mode-switching. Addressed to millennial and Gen Z professionals, Digital Overwhelm draws on biblical wisdom literature to offer a primer on organizational communication. Each chapter is followed by a short Mode Switch Workshop addressing questions such as how to survive the Zoom room, how to write an email that sounds like you, how to get unstuck when tools break down, and how to get people to do things—so you can, too. Even technologically disrupted organizations are more navigable than they feel—if you know how to switch up your modes of communication.