Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe
Title | Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe PDF eBook |
Author | Paul Betts |
Publisher | Springer |
Total Pages | 310 |
Release | 2016-05-14 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1137546395 |
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
Title | Religion and the Cold War PDF eBook |
Author | D. Kirby |
Publisher | Springer |
Total Pages | 259 |
Release | 2002-12-13 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1403919577 |
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
Title | The Academic Study of Religion During the Cold War PDF eBook |
Author | Iva Dolezalova |
Publisher | Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers |
Total Pages | 368 |
Release | 2001 |
Genre | History |
ISBN |
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
Title | Orthodoxy and the Cold War PDF eBook |
Author | L. Leustean |
Publisher | Springer |
Total Pages | 286 |
Release | 2008-12-10 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0230594948 |
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
Title | Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism PDF eBook |
Author | Michael Gehler |
Publisher | Leuven University Press |
Total Pages | 361 |
Release | 2019-11-20 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 9462702160 |
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
Title | The Spiritual-Industrial Complex PDF eBook |
Author | Jonathan P. Herzog |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | 286 |
Release | 2011-08-05 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0199830746 |
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
Title | A Sacred Space Is Never Empty PDF eBook |
Author | Victoria Smolkin |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Total Pages | 360 |
Release | 2019-10-29 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0691197237 |
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.