This study examines the religious composition of the population on so-called state estates, which included estates administered by an official body, but also by the Religious, Study and Endowment Fund, or Charles-Ferdinand University. The research is based on a survey event that took place on the estates in 1802. Analyses revealed that a majority Catholic population lived on the estate. This was particularly typical of western Bohemia. Conversely, the Protestant tradition was confirmed in the eastern Bohemian estates, especially Podebrady and Pardubice, and also the estates of Vetrny Jenikov and Stredokluky. While on the estates of Pardubice and Vetrny Jenikov Protestants were concentrated in particular areas, in Podebrady the co-existence of Catholics and Helvetians was quite common. With regard to the Jewish population, unlike the Protestants there were Jews living in most of the state estates, but the proportion of the population they represented was much lower, around less than 1%, and it was more a matter of individual families.
The aim of this article is to analyze a specific case of 'ethnic succession'. This topic emerged in the social sciences in the early 1900s, within the first Chicago school (the Robert Park school). Since that time, many models of succession (drawing upon biological ecology) have been presented. In this paper, a succession in one specific field and one specific place is analyzed: an unfinished process of takeover of a Roman Catholic parish by the rapidly growing Hispanic population from the shrinking Polish American population in the West Side of South Bend in northern Indiana. This process meant also the cultural elimination of the Hungarian Americans from the 'independent' religious life in the town's quarter. In the multicultural contexts, religion is often closely related to ethnicity, and in the well-known theory authored by Milton Gordon, religion is one of three possible bases of ethnicity in American society. In the case discussed here, the two ethnic groups, Hispanics and Polish Americans, belong to the same religious denomination. Moreover, historically speaking, Roman Catholicism has been a very significant element of their ethnic identities. From the recent cultural point of view, however, these are two quite different types of Catholicism. Ethnic succession discussed in this text has important consequences for the cultural features of Catholicism in the whole town. In the article, the local Polish American community and the Hispanic community is briefly presented, and then the 'succession' problems discussed. To the extent it makes sense (and the empirical material is available), the elements of the 'process of passage' and the 'ceremony of passage', important for socio-cultural anthropology, are presented as well.
This article considers the effects of atheism, an intellectual and political movement denying the existence of God (the Supernatural) and casting doubt on the point of institutions connected with God in twentieth-century Bohemia and Moravia. The author distinguishes between atheist, agnostic, and 'non-believer,' and, referring to contemporary sociological research into religiousness in Czech society, argues that it would be wrong to consider the mass turning away from traditional confessions to be evidence of its prevailing atheism or a consequence of forty years of Communist dictatorship. The article considers the topic in the broader historical context, and points to the anticlerical (essentially anti-Roman Catholic) tradition in modern Czech history, which is rooted in the National Revival and was intensified in connection with the anti-Habsburg struggle leading to the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic. The Communist regime, seeking, after it took power in February 1948, to suppress the Church and religion, thus found fertile ground. The beginning of atheism in the Czech milieu, as elsewhere in Europe, is linked to the development of the Freethinkers movement. Within this movement (the Czech section, 'Volna myslenka', was founded in 1904), a positivist current predominated at first. From the early 1920s, however, its views increasingly clashed with the Marxist-influenced stream. That stream originated in Marx's interpretation of religion as a false, alienated consciousness, serving the interests of reactionary social forces and an outdated 'scientific view of the world.' Atheism in the Marxist conception was thus understood not only as a noetic perspective, but also as a set of principles forming part of Communist, or Socialist, ethics. The author argues that, after taking power, the Communist regime commenced its struggle against the Churches (particularly the Roman Catholic) with the help of propaganda that was political rather than atheist, owing both to tactical considerations (the considerable religiousness of the rural population) and to the implicit conviction of Communist functionaries that religion would die out together with the people and institutions that represented it. In the 1950s, 'scientific atheism' had not yet emerged from Marxist-Leninist doctrine as an independent discipline, and was therefore not a special subject of the school curriculum or scholarly debate. It emerged slowly, in about the 1960s, but by then, with the overall liberalization of society, relations between the Churches and State had improved, and space for religious ideas had begun to appear. In the last part of the article, the author describes the institutionalization of 'scientific atheism' as part of the strategy of 'Normalization,' reflected for example in the founding the Institute of Scientific Atheism at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Brno, 1972. The mission of this institute was not merely the theoretical refutation of religion and the promotion of a 'scientific view of the world' in research into the orientation of the population in this respect, but also the elaboration of assessments for publications with regard to their 'ideological incorruptibility' and assessments of the activity of the clergy in deciding to revoke the requirement of State consent for those who wished to work as members of the clergy.
An important form of State control of the churches and their repression under Communist rule was the education of young clergymen at the faculties of theology. After 1953, the only officially permitted Roman Catholic faculty of theology was in the Bohemian town of Litomerice. The author, an important journalist and novelist in the period following the Changes of late 1989, studied there from 1984 to 1989. In the form of personal memoirs he describes the faculty in those days. It was not academically strong, and seminary life served more to control future clergymen (since graduating from the faculty was a necessary condition for subsequent work with the Church) than it was to provide space for spiritual development. Though the students had to be screened by the secret police, which had tried to lure them into collaboration even at the entrance exams, they were definitely not pro-regime. That is particularly true of members of the secret religious Orders. In the second half of the 1980s no one even bothered anymore to persuade students of the necessity of changing one's anti-Communist attitude. As long as one did not make this attitude clear, the system worked. Theologians themselves could thus not be certain whether they were part of the 'visible', collaborating Church, or were part of the opposition, because simply by having entered the faculty they had made it clear what they thought about the establishment's Marxist ideology. The situation at the Roman Catholic faculty of theology (which by its subservience to the State authorities brought to mind the general seminaries of the eighteenth century in the reign of Joseph II) thus basically resembled the situation throughout the 'official' Church in the Bohemian Lands and throughout Czech society as well. Consequently, its transformation after the Changes of late 1989 is taking a long time.
Following the historical tradition of spiritual searching which is deeply rooted in Russian literature, the article elaborates on the presence of religious experience in Russian prose of the 21st century. It also shows the ambivalent perception of religious phenomena by modern literary theory and criticism. The apparent return of Russian literature to its Christian tradition manifested in the number of writings with explicitly religious motives shows, when analysed thoroughly, a rather les developed treatment of spiritual searching and the thematization of the individual religious experience. The search for God and faith typical for Russian literature was replaced by presenting God at the turn of the 21st century. The confessional nature of Russian literature, penetrating deeply into the depths of the human soul, is disappearing from prose writings and simultaneously one can observe the tendency to preaching and moralization. The article based on the analysis of works that were written in the last decade and that received a strong response from both literary critics and readers. They seek to understand whether the Christian themes are only a fashionable cultural and social trend or a development of the spiritual tradition of Russian literature.
In this article the author presents a fundamental overview of developments in religion in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. He compares the situation in West European countries and post-Communist countries, and, referring to the literature, analyzes some central trends. He explains, particularly the longstanding paradigmatic concept of secularization, whose currently most influential proponent is Steve Bruce, and three alternative models - Rodney Stark's theory of rational religious choice, Daniele Hervieu-Leger's concept of religious memory, and Jose Casanova's version of the concept of three autonomous components of secularization (whose meeting led to a striking decline in church-based religiousness in Western Europe). The author also considers questions of secularization and the subsequent changes outside and within the established churches, their legal standing, and influence on politics, the mass media, the school system, and other areas. He also explores the development and subsequent decline in the importance of new religious movements, including positions taken against them and against immigrants' religiousness, as well as the influence of implicit religions. Whereas 'political religion' has long lost its role in shaping identity, functional equivalents of religiousness appear mainly in European secularism, which, on the one hand, has Christian roots and has also quite successfully substituted for church-based Christianity, for example in the form of a negative European identity with regard to Muslims. In Late Modern Europe, the author argues, a great number of privatized religious or spiritual forms continue to exist. They may get the attention of only a small part of the public and encourage them to participate, but their influence as a cultural milieu is much larger. In Europe these and other religious processes are not asserted with equal force; though various forms of religion or non-religion have also been entering European politics and public life, they remain controversial partly because they are expressed in different measure and form.
In the paper we try to grasp the philosophical aspects of the poetic work of Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-68 BC.). We analyse supposed philosophical and ideological inspirations of his work, as well as the character of his time, the so-called Pax Augusta, which determined his efforts to give the Roman society a revival impetus. Further, we focus on the thesis claiming different forms of Horatius’ philosophical eclecticism with the intention to disprove the thesis: we propose a reasonable hypothesis about the unifying framework of Horatius philosophical view, namely his strong religious belief in the intervention of gods into individual and also collective events of mankind.
In the advancement of our understanding of the nature and development of student learning, learning approaches (LA) take centre stage, usually differentiated (Biggs, 2001) as Surface (SA), Deep (DA) and Achieving (AA). These styles are conditioned by aspects of the context and the student, but religion has not been studied. This study was designed ex post facto using correlation, discrimination and regression analysis, and its results indicated an association between religion and LA. DA was associated with an experience of and interest in spirituality. However, SA and AA were related to measurements of religious orientation and beliefs. Existential wellbeing was inversely related to deep approaches and positively to surface and achieving approaches. Religion showed a limited capacity to discriminate among different LAs.
The aim of this article is to present a special kind of ancient rituals called 'namburbi'. Therefore, they are shown in a wide context of ancient Near Eastern religion and magic, which explains the sense of their existence. They were performed after a god's decision to punish an individual or a society, which was carried by an evil omen. Among different kinds of rituals connected with divination, 'namburbi' rituals, and only them, were used to prevent imminent and unknown calamities. This characteristic of 'namburbi' rituals is based on many extant omen series, the authors of which recommend to perform 'namburbi' in the case of noticing an evil sign with an uncertain explanation. We can distinguish a few groups of 'namburbi' - these that are against calamities carried by specific terrestrial, celestial, animal or human omens and these that prevent any aftermath of evil sings at all. The last part of the article describes the structure of 'namburbi' rituals, which is hardly changeable. It includes rites of purification, different types of incantations and, in the main part, a suit against the evil sign in the form of a clay figure, which closely reflected a Mesopotamian lawsuit. Concluding, we can presume that 'namburbi' rituals had grown from folk magic and later they reached the highest strata of the ancient society, making up for a marked lack of rites in the official cult and magic. Another conclusion is that we can encounter specific elements of 'namburbi' rituals in the magic and the religion of Asia Minor's and Mediterranean cultures of later times.
In this article the author seeks to explain some fundamental features of Roman Catholic spirituality in the Bohemian Lands after the Second World War. He demonstrates that this phenomenon was in essence both determined by the 'Roman Catholic Renaissance' of the 1930s and by new tendencies, particularly after the Communist takeover of February 1948. Among these tendencies was its enforced closed nature, fear of persecution, traditionalism, and conservatism, which were mainly the result of the limitations on being in touch with people abroad. On the whole, however, the author believes that Czech Roman Catholicism from the Communist takeover to the collapse of the regime in late 1989, despite all its problems, contributed to Czech culture, and he demonstrates this also in the reception of the Second Vatican Council in Bohemia and Moravia. The spirituality of women, both of nuns and of secular intellectuals, receives special praise in the article.
The article first summarizes projects of quantitative sociological research into Czech religiousness, which were carried out from 1946 to 1989 (when, with the exception of 1950, religious affiliation was not a question on the census), and it subjects this research to a methodical critique. The author then discusses the institutional background of these research projects. Research into religious attitudes was carried out in 1946 by the recently established Institute of Public Opinion Research. After the Communist takeover, however, sociology was no longer an acceptable discipline, and State organs that were also working against religion took over this research task. Their research into 'objective religious factors,' conducted from the 1950s to the 1980s, considered only the decline in church-based religious feeling. More profound sociological research was made possible with the establishment of the Institute of Sociology at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in the 1960s. Though this research was in the sway of the models of the period, that is to say, the 'sociology of the parish', it was relatively successful, methodologically suitable research (for instance into religiousness in North Moravia, 1963, with an attempt to expand it to the whole country), and met with a positive international response. It was doomed, however, by the policy of 'Normalization,' when the Institute of Sociology was merged with the Institute of Philosophy. Sociological research into religion was then entrusted to the Institute of Scientific Atheism, which was established in Brno. (The most important research that it conducted was into the religiousness of pupils and students of elementary and secondary schools in South Moravia, 1979.) Similar research was also carried out by the reorganized Public Opinion Research Institute in 1979, 1983, 1985, 1986, and 1989. Not one of these projects, however, can be considered rigorous, because the methods used were ideologically in the sway of the regime, it was not of sufficiently professional quality, and was palpably behind modern Western developments in the sociology of religion. More credible research, though limited for practical reasons, was provided by 'samizdat' and emigre sociology, which cast doubt on the idea of the automatic secularization of Czech society in connection with modernization and the dominance of Marxist thought. The development of truly unbiased research could take place only after the changes that began in late 1989. When interpreting earlier research and comparing results with contemporary findings on religiousness one must therefore bear in mind that it cannot be done without taking into account the conditions of the society and of the discipline in which the research was originally conducted, as well as the aims it was intended for.
This article draws largely on the author's personal recollections of independent Roman Catholic education in Czechoslovakia in the 'Normalization' period, 1970-89, which he places into a more general interpretation of this kind of educational activity. His aim, however, is to provide a picture of the still virtually unknown educational and church activities, rather than to present a complex treatment of the topic. Drawing also on the recollections of other people who were involved, the author discusses the independent religious education of little children within the family, and then, in greater detail, describes working with youth and the training of their leaders, particularly amongst the Salesians, whom he was involved with in the 1980s. Although the Salesians were the most active community in terms of the catechism, they did not limit themselves to working with young people. On the other hand, the social scope of these activities was not large, even within the Church. Lastly, the author discusses parallel post-secondary education, in particularly the seminars held in private flats, and he discusses in greater detail the wide range of the educational work of Josef Zverina (particularly in north Moravia and Prague), which was the theological equivalent of these seminars. In this and other cases, however, he asks whether informal educational programmes met, or even could meet, sufficient standards, and he recalls some contemporaneous 'samizdat' discussions concerning the quality, character, and purpose of the 'extracurricular' and 'counter-curricular' education.
The research was aimed at finding the measure of influence of cognitive-individual variables (Need for Structure, Ability to Achieve Cognitive Structure, Self-Esteem, Cognitive Style ‘Category Width’), linguistic variables (Verbal Intelligence, Morphology Score), and demographic variables (Study-year, Grade, Living abroad) on syntactic abilities of students studying English language and culture at the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. Subsequently, we investigated the relation between syntactic ability and chosen variables. We used the following research methods: PNS Scale (Thompson et al., 1992), AACS (Bar-Tal, 1994), RSES (Rosenberg, 1965), C-W (Pettigrew, 1958), I-S-T (Amthauer, 1953, in Halama, Tomková, 2005), and Syntactic Abilities Test (Užáková et al., 2010). Findings showed a negative correlation between syntactic abilities and Morphology Score, between Study-year, Morphology Score and Grade. A positive correlation was observed between syntactic ability and Verbal Intelligence, and a negative correlation between Verbal Intelligence and Need for Structure. The observed variables explain 34% variability of syntactic ability in foreign language.
The author analyses content and formal structures of a sermon as an individual genre. He reasons that texts of religious communication sphere are not united on a base of a special religious style, but they are related to the several functional language styles.
Religious education as a compulsory subject played an important role in the educational process. The foundations of faith acquired by children in the family milieu were followed up by religious education at school. After 1918, both the system of education and the subject of religious education itself changed. The text outlines the form of changes in the teaching of religion after the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 in the contemporary context. It focuses on selected legislative changes, as well as on the reactions in the press in that period.
The application of my theory of religious cycles to the development of inter-religious and trans-religious thinking is twofold. First, it goes beyond the uni religious approach and claims to religious exclusivity, by viewing different spiritual traditions as essentially one, by focusing on the common evolution of religions and arguing for the identical pattern of this evolution. Second, by distinguishing between the structural and systemic crises of religion, my theory offers a sound theoretical justification as to why people are irresistibly drawn into interreligious and trans-religious ideas and attitudes. Our time is characterized by the total crisis of religious consciousness and, therefore, bears witness to different versions of syncretism and eclecticism out of which new religious movements are developed and established.
The topic of this article is 'apocalypticism', that is, a catastrophic vision of modern civilization with no prospect of a turnaround in one's inner world, as it appears in the works of four Czech Roman Catholic thinkers, who were emigres after the Communist takeover of 1948. While in his native land, the historian and columnist Karel Schwarzenberg (1911-1986) wrote in a starkly apocalyptic, anti-civilization spirit, in the tradition of Leon Bloy and Josef Florian. In exile, however, his apocalypticism became milder, and was projected more into his experience of the liturgy (the fleetingness of time). The apocalypticism of the historian, Christian sociologist, publicist, writer, and politician Bohdan Chudoba (1909-1982), and the Germanist, political philosopher, and translator Rio Preisner (1925-2007) was, by contrast, intensified while emigres. Independently of each other, they created great bodies of work (Preisner was published, but Chudoba's writing has remained largely in manuscript), in which they tried to present a total vision of history, which was, from their perspective, necessarily doomed. Similarly, they perceive the attempt to modernize the Church after the Second Vatican Council as part of this catastrophic process, because the Church, in their opinion, was conforming to negative tendencies in the world. The Germanist and theologian Vladimir Neuwirth (1921-1998) wrote 'Apokalypticky denik' (Apocalyptic Diary), which is not 'apocalyptic' in the usual sense of the word. Rather, it is 'consoling' - the apocalypse is an ever-present dimension of human existence and the world, and one must be able to live with it and accept it. It follows from the comparisons in this article that the apocalypticism of Schwarzenberg and Neuwirth, both of whom worked with Czech emigre clergymen and their associates who mostly agreed with the changes after the Second Vatican Council, tended to diminish, whereas Chudoba and Preisner, who parted on bad terms with those clergymen and their associates, became entrenched in their position as 'lone critics on the margin of a (rotten) Church'. It seems that work with Church institutions to some extent protected emigre writers from extreme apocalyptic tendencies. (The emigre novelist Jan Cep is a similar example.) According to the author, however, there is a fundamental difference between the two lone, 'real' apocalyptics: whereas Chudoba ended up in Spain in true isolation, without having any hope towards the end of his life that his ideas would find a wider audience, Preisner, in America, lived to see the day when a vision of the world very close to his own would move from the margins back to the forefront of public discourse in the opinions of the American Neo-Conservatives of the early twenty-first century.
This article deals with the manuscript of a little known Baroque sermon called 'Rurale Ivaniticum' from the Library of the Prague Crusaders. Its author is the forgotten Carmelite P. Ivanus a S. Ioanne Baptista. The main subject is the usefulness of the manuscript for the study of 18th century popular culture in Bohemia. The sermon by P. Ivanus a S. Ioanne Baptista was aimed almost exclusively at the lower class rural population. Hence the 'Rurale ivaniticum' manuscript provides quite frequent examples of didactically intended folk sayings, as well as attacks on folk demonology and oneiromancy. It is from these parts of the manuscript that a merger of scholarly and folk culture clearly emerges.
This study, predominantly based on archive materials, brings to light a chapter of the church history which is relatively poorly researched. It uses an investigatory method to demonstrate the efforts of the communist state power in Czechoslovakia to liquidate or at least radically restrict the existence of women's orders in the 1950s. False and artificially fabricated law-suits with top church dignitaries and the representatives of orders were accompanied by administrative restrictions of nuns' activities followed by their forceful relocation to special 'centralized monasteries'. Along with these measures, the representatives of the state power at the regional and district level conducted coercive operation code-named 'Take off your habit' designed to make the nuns betray their monastic vows, leave their monastic way of life and join other 'useful members of society'. This study is a part of a wider project, dealt with by the author, of the Czech Science Foundation, No. 409/07/0475 for 2009.
In this article the author examines the coexistence of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren and the Communist regime in the first several years after the Communist takeover, 1948-56. The first part of his analysis, inspired by French and German research on the social history of power by Sandrine Kott and Thomas Lindenberger, outlines the points of contact as well as ideological and political affinities between Protestants and Communists before the February 1948 takeover. These were particularly clear in the Protestant weekly 'Kostnicke jiskry' (Sparks from Constance) after the Second World War. Owing to this rapprochement and also to their reflexes developed for survival in the unfavourable circumstances the Protestant minority adapted with relative success to conditions in the Communist dictatorship. To consolidate themselves, they skilfully used instruments offered by the regime, such as 'voluntary' work groups (brigady), while the regime relied on Protestants (particularly ministers) in some of its important political strategies such as collectivization and elections. The author pays particular attention to the theologian and philosopher Josef Lukl Hromadka (1889-1969), who was, in his day, a central figure amongst Czechoslovak Protestants. His 'instrumentalization' also operated in two directions: in the West, as a representative of Christian peace activities, he helped to create the illusion of religious freedom in Communist Czechoslovakia, but he also served Protestants as a 'shield' and mediator enabling them to establish and maintain contacts with Western theologians. In the article the author also seeks to demonstrate that assiduous analysis of archive records of State, Party, and Church provenance reveals the inner contradictions in the Communist 'apparat' regarding relations with the churches and its own powers as well as links of alliance amongst some of its organs and the churches.
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