rss_2.0Sciendo RSS Feed for Review of Ecumenical Studies Sibiuhttps://sciendo.com/journal/RESShttps://www.sciendo.comhttps://sciendo-parsed-data-feed.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/6005bbe6e797941b18f25667/cover-image.jpghttps://sciendo.com/journal/RESS140216https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0116<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>After the fall of communist regime religion returned to play a significant role both in the public life and the research agenda in Romania. Admittedly disadvantaged by many factors, Romanian Roma intellectual elites addressed the topic as part of an effort to give voice to their ethnic group. Their writing back to the negative profiling of the ethnic group involved confrontation of the antigypsist narratives produced and shared by non-Roma academics, which reflected the power relations between the majority population and the Roma minority. Some of the narratives were articulated and culturally reproduced in religious terms. Like the other ethnic groups living in post-communist Romania, Romanian Roma intellectuals have not missed their chance to address religion as an element in the identity politics they take part in. In this paper, I examine the manners in which the first generation of post-communist Romanian Roma intellectuals addressed the religious profile and religious affiliation and/or affinities of their ethnic group. I will also try to highlight whether there are consonances or, on the contrary, dissonances between the Western Roma and Romanian Roma narratives in this matter.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01162023-01-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0114<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>History has shown a 20^th century marked by political, geopolitical, social, and economic metamorphosis, especially for the European continent. Romanian’s physical borders were reshaped during the first half of this century and caught between a political, social, and ethnic whirlwind. For Roma people, the 1920s and 1930s came with substantial turmoil as their efforts to establish various forms of representation and organization were not supported by the Romanian authorities, nor by public opinion. The public discourse was dominated by prejudice, stereotypes, and amplified marginalization. The far-right’s extreme tendencies, compounded by public discourse, spread Roma stereotypes such as “the thief”, “the other”, “the diseases carrier”, “the pariah”, “the unwanted” etc., and generated the idea of “us against them” which heavily impacted the deportation process.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01142023-01-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0118<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This article presents reflections on Roma inclusion in the context of intra-European mobility. It begins with accounts of visits to two religious actors running centres providing humanitarian assistance, social services, and opportunities to exercise religion to Roma and other migrants in Oslo, Norway: the Lutheran Church City Mission welcoming Roma migrants as guests in the City Mission Centre at Tøyen Church and the Pentecostal organisation Evangeliesenteret, where Roma migrants receive food and participate in religious gatherings at the Contact Centre. The article reflects on the modes of inclusion represented in these two accounts in relation to three different approaches to inclusion: EU Roma policy, the work of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, and diaconal theology. The article ends with reflections on what inclusion might mean in the context of intra-European Roma mobility.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01182023-01-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0122ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01222023-01-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0124ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01242023-01-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0123ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01232023-01-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0117<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>The main concern of this article is to examine the conditions for Roma education through church and religious education. The program of the Holy Metropolis of Demetrias and Almyros “Agios Thaddeos” for the education of Roma is taken as a case study. This program belongs to the non-formal education sector. At the same time, the theological prerequisites of such programs by the Orthodox Church are examined in connection with the cultural identity of the Roma. The article concludes with an exploration of the conditions for the inclusion of Roma in formal education through religious education. The main purpose of Roma participation in religious education is religious literacy rather than catechism, as well as the preservation of their particular cultural identity. Emphasis is placed on the use of the tools of intercultural education and differentiated teaching in religious education based on the new curricula in Greece. In this way, formal and non-formal education are linked.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01172023-01-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0115<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This paper analyzes the way in which religion bolstered Roma people’s demands for civic emancipation and strengthened their ethnic and cultural identity in 1970s and 1980s Romania. Based on documents mainly from the former secret police, the Securitate, the paper is divided into two main parts. The “rst is a general overview of the state of the Roma people in communist Romania and the main initiatives for their civic emancipation. Next, the paper uses the perspective of “lived religion” to study three elements that informed the religious life of Roma during the 1970s and 1980s. These are the persistence of religious beliefs, the creation of Gypsy Neo-Protestant churches, and religious pilgrimage. Moreover, the paper will show that religious practice strengthened ethnic identity, favoured individual agency, and raised questions about equal rights and religious freedom.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01152023-01-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0121ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01212023-01-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0119<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Roma communities in Eastern Europe have long experienced socio-political and religious marginalization, a current phenomenon resulting from complex factors spanning over centuries. The rise of evangelical and Pentecostal movements among the Roma over the last decades have contributed to social uplift and more integration in certain contexts. However, societies in crisis are often an unexpected gauge to assess realities and tensions–in this case, the war in Ukraine and COVID-19 revealed the deep suspicion and prejudice still existing toward the Roma. Nonetheless, a number of Roma Pentecostals and Baptists became actively involved in responding to both crises. First placing the relationship between religion, society, and the Roma in historical context, this paper will explore how Christian Roma reacted to the dual crises and the implications for their relationship to the wider church and society,</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01192023-01-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0120ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01202023-01-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0113ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01132023-01-11T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0103<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>In the late Russian Empire, and later Soviet Ukraine, aspects of Baptist doctrine and communal life earned Baptists the suspicion of their Orthodox neighbors and of state and ecclesiastical authorities. Depending on the dynamics of change, the perceived foreign origins of Baptism, their advocacy of pacificism, and their understandings of morality and transformation were either viewed favorably and allowed these communities to grow through conversion. Or, the same attributes earned Baptists the wrath of state and Church authorities and led to repression. This article analyzes how and why the threat posed by a minority faith group changed over time and how these communities adapted.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01032022-11-10T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0110ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01102022-11-10T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0102<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>This study deals with the emergence of organised forms of resistance to the Bolshevik policies of secularisation, and the role that documents introduced into the religious landscape in the 1920s by the Soviet regime played in it. Integral to the Bolshevik campaign of eliminating religions, the mandatory registration of religious communities transposed into the religious landscape the organisational forms and techniques of the production of documents characteristic of bureaucracy, which enhanced the capability of believers to pose an organised resistance to antireligious policies. This paper measures the consequence of these documents and bureaucratic practices, their role in the consolidation of religious organisations and the creation of antagonism between parishioners and state officials. My study is centred on the case of the Orthodox Church of our Lady of Kazan from Cioburciu (Moldavian Region of Soviet Ukraine), the construction of which was at the heart of the confrontation of Orthodox believers from this settlement with the Soviet authorities.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01022022-11-10T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0108<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Absence is made present through objects, images, texts, or thoughts and, through various practices, absence also has agency. Absence was often a reality which Old Calendarists had to endure due to the intrusive character of the secret police: their churches were destroyed, they were deprived of their religious books, photographs, icons, and even religious leaders. These actions created an absence which, in turn, I argue in this article, inspired the Old Calendarist’s strive for survival. Today, the secret police archives in Romania store many of these absences, be they objects, images or life stories, that could become presences and continue, complete, or simply end some chapters in the histories of the Old Calendarist Church. In this study I will offer examples that convey the manners in which the Old Calendarist Church managed to navigate through and make use of these absences in order to survive persecution, highlighting the value of the secret police archives as sites or spaces of recovery from absence and loss.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01082022-11-10T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0107<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>The secret police archives present the life of the religious underground as seen by the secret officers who were seeking to facilitate those communities’ destruction. The state’s official narrative about these clandestine groups is mirrored in alternative documents and narratives. This article focuses on the Old Calendarist Orthodox monastic community of the Dormition of the Mother of God Monastery in the Strada Televiziunii in Bucharest at the end of the communist regime. It showcases the life of the monastery as described in the diary of a monastic novice whose written account of becoming a monk described the last days of the monastery before its destruction by the secret police in 1983.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01072022-11-10T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0111ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01112022-11-10T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0105<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>The paper discusses the forging of a carceral legionary theophany based on oneiric experience and the apparitions of saints to imprisoned members of the Iron Guard in contemporary Romania. It also approaches the post-Communist instrumentalization of the legionaries’ prison experience (dreams, visions of the Virgin and saints, “dreams of terror”) in supporting their claim of canonizing fascists martyrs as saints of the Romanian Orthodox Church.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01052022-11-10T00:00:00.000+00:00https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-0104<abstract> <title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> <p>Vasilica Barbu, also known as Mother Veronica, a seer and then an abbess in mid-twentieth century Romania, had visions of Jesus, Mary, and a variety of angels and saints, beginning in 1937. Supported by her parish priest and other local believers, she published an account of her visions and founded a convent for adolescent girls. The Vladimireşti convent proved to be very successful, but the Securitate (secret police) decided to close it down on the grounds that it was harbouring fascist fugitives. A close reading of how Barbu navigated the challenges of poverty, patriarchy, and the rise of state socialism reveals not only a story of incredible tenacity in the face of adversity but also how fundamentally religious values changed following the Second World War. Whereas in the late 1930s Barbu’s visions enabled her to bring together a strong community of supporters and to attract the attention of the most powerful men in the country, in the early 1950s both Church leaders and the Securitate attacked “mysticism” as heterodox and socially deviant.</p> </abstract>ARTICLEtruehttps://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/ress-2022-01042022-11-10T00:00:00.000+00:00en-us-1