Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe

Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe
Author: Paul Betts
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2016-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137546395

Download Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Religion and science were fundamental aspects of Eastern European communist political culture from the very beginning, and remained in uneasy tension across the region over the decades. While both topics have long attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, they almost invariably have been studied discretely as separate stories. Religion, Science and Communism in Cold War Europe is the first scholarly effort to explore the delicate interface of religion, science and communism in Cold War Europe. It brings together an international team of researchers who address this relationship from a number of national viewpoints and thematic perspectives, ranging from mysticism to social science, space exploration to the socialist lifecycle, and architectural heritage to pop culture.

Religion and the Cold War

Religion and the Cold War
Author: D. Kirby
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2002-12-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1403919577

Download Religion and the Cold War Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Although seen widely as the twentieth-century's great religious war, as a conflict between the god-fearing and the godless, the religious dimension of the Cold War has never been subjected to a scholarly critique. This unique study shows why religion is a key Cold War variable. A specially commissioned collection of new scholarship, it provides fresh insights into the complex nature of the Cold War. It has profound resonance today with the resurgence of religion as a political force in global society.

The Academic Study of Religion During the Cold War

The Academic Study of Religion During the Cold War
Author: Iva Dolezalova
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN:

Download The Academic Study of Religion During the Cold War Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

While the academic study of religion in the former Soviet Union had to contend with an official ideology of scientific atheism, such study in the West - particularly in the United States - was being (re)invented in the 1960s, during the very midst of the Cold War. The twenty-one contributions to this volume - by scholars from North America, Europe, Russia, and eastern Europe - examine the ideological and theological influences on the academic study of religion during the period from 1945 to 1989 and thus raise the question of whether an academic study of religion (Religionswissenschaft) might be defined in ways that avoid the extremes of both ideology and theology.

Orthodoxy and the Cold War

Orthodoxy and the Cold War
Author: L. Leustean
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2008-12-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230594948

Download Orthodoxy and the Cold War Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Explores the dynamics between Orthodoxy and politics in Romania, providing an accessible narrative on church-state relations from the establishment of the state in 1859 to the rise of Ceau?escu in 1965. The book argues that Romanian national communism had an ally in a strong Church, and analyzes religious diplomacy with actors in the West.

Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism

Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism
Author: Michael Gehler
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2019-11-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9462702160

Download Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Debates on the role of Christian Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe too often remain strongly tied to national historiographies. With the edited collection the contributing authors aim to reconstruct Christian Democracy’s role in the fall of Communism from a bird's-eye perspective by covering the entire region and by taking “third-way” options in the broader political imaginary of late-Cold War Europe into account. The book’s twelve chapters present the most recent insights on this topic and connect scholarship on the Iron Curtain’s collapse with scholarship on political Catholicism. Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism offers the reader a two-fold perspective. The first approach examines the efforts undertaken by Western European actors who wanted to foster or support Christian Democratic initiatives in Central and Eastern Europe. The second approach is devoted to the (re-)emergence of homegrown Christian Democratic formations in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the volume’s seminal contributions lies in its documentation of the decisive role that Christian Democracy played in supporting the political and anti-political forces that engineered the collapse of Communism from within between 1989 and 1991.

The Spiritual-Industrial Complex

The Spiritual-Industrial Complex
Author: Jonathan P. Herzog
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2011-08-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199830746

Download The Spiritual-Industrial Complex Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

In his farewell address, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation of the perils of the military-industrial complex. But as Jonathan Herzog shows in this insightful history, Eisenhower had spent his presidency contributing to another, lesser known, Cold War collaboration: the spiritual-industrial complex. This fascinating volume shows that American leaders in the early Cold War years considered the conflict to be profoundly religious; they saw Communism not only as godless but also as a sinister form of religion. Fighting faith with faith, they deliberately used religious beliefs and institutions as part of the plan to defeat the Soviet enemy. Herzog offers an illuminating account of the resultant spiritual-industrial complex, chronicling the rhetoric, the programs, and the policies that became its hallmarks. He shows that well-known actions like the addition of the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance were a small part of a much larger and relatively unexplored program that promoted religion nationwide. Herzog shows how these efforts played out in areas of American life both predictable and unexpected--from pulpits and presidential appeals to national faith drives, military training barracks, public school classrooms, and Hollywood epics. Millions of Americans were bombarded with the message that the religious could not be Communists, just a short step from the all-too-common conclusion that the irreligious could not be true Americans. Though the spiritual-industrial complex declined in the 1960s, its statutes, monuments, and sentiments live on as bulwarks against secularism and as reminders that the nation rests upon the groundwork of religious faith. They continue to serve as valuable allies for those defending the place of religion in American life.

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty
Author: Victoria Smolkin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2019-10-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691197237

Download A Sacred Space Is Never Empty Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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 campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

Voices of the Voiceless

Voices of the Voiceless
Author: Julie K. deGraffenried
Publisher: 1845 Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Communism and religion
ISBN: 9781481311236

Download Voices of the Voiceless Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

In 1969, at the height of the Cold War, a group of British Christian researchers and activists, moved by the persecution of believers in the Soviet Union, established an organization dedicated to the study of religion under communism. They had two major goals: to educate the public about religious persecution and to promote academic analysis of religion in communist societies. The organization they founded, eventually named Keston College, amassed an extraordinary collection of primary source and research materials, used by its personnel to document the experiences of persecuted believers in the Soviet bloc and beyond and to publicize human rights violations against believers of all faiths. This formed the basis of a unique collection, called the Keston Archive, now at Baylor University. Voices of the Voiceless, edited by Julie deGraffenried and Zoe Knox, presents readers with twenty-five essays on a curated selection of images and artifacts from the Keston Archive. Some of the world's leading authorities on religion and communism as well as experts personally involved with the operation of Keston College carefully selected and provided commentary for these images. The archival material presented in the book offers vivid testimony of this critically important era in the history of religion and of the Cold War. A guided look into the past, Voices of the Voiceless reveals the power of what atheist and antireligious regimes sought to silence. This collection documents how believers fought for religious freedom, coped with oppression, and practiced their faith, individually and collectively, in states hostile to religion. It also presents atheist propaganda produced by communist regimes that aimed to marginalize and ultimately eradicate religion. This book offers insights into how faith survived--and even flourished--during one of the most intense antireligious campaigns of the modern era.

The FBI and Religion

The FBI and Religion
Author: Sylvester A. Johnson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2017-02-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0520962427

Download The FBI and Religion Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has had a long and tortuous relationship with religion over almost the entirety of its existence. As early as 1917, the Bureau began to target religious communities and groups it believed were hotbeds of anti-American politics. Whether these religious communities were pacifist groups that opposed American wars, or religious groups that advocated for white supremacy or direct conflict with the FBI, the Bureau has infiltrated and surveilled religious communities that run the gamut of American religious life. The FBI and Religion recounts this fraught and fascinating history, focusing on key moments in the Bureau’s history. Starting from the beginnings of the FBI before World War I, moving through the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War, up to 9/11 and today, this book tackles questions essential to understanding not only the history of law enforcement and religion, but also the future of religious liberty in America.