The Old Faith and the Russian Landis a historical ethnography that charts the ebbs and flows of ethical practice in a small Russian town over three centuries. The town of Sepych was settled in the ...late seventeenth century by religious dissenters who fled to the forests of the Urals to escape a world they believed to be in the clutches of the Antichrist. Factions of Old Believers, as these dissenters later came to be known, have maintained a presence in the town ever since. The townspeople of Sepych have also been serfs, free peasants, collective farmers, and, now, shareholders in a post-Soviet cooperative.
Douglas Rogers traces connections between the town and some of the major transformations of Russian history, showing how townspeople have responded to a long series of attempts to change them and their communities: tsarist-era efforts to regulate family life and stamp out Old Belief on the Stroganov estates, Soviet collectivization drives and antireligious campaigns, and the marketization, religious revival, and ongoing political transformations of post-Soviet times. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival and manuscript sources, Rogers argues that religious, political, and economic practice are overlapping arenas in which the people of Sepych have striven to be ethical-in relation to labor and money, food and drink, prayers and rituals, religious books and manuscripts, and the surrounding material landscape.
He tracks the ways in which ethical sensibilities-about work and prayer, hierarchy and inequality, gender and generation-have shifted and recombined over time. Rogers concludes that certain expectations about how to be an ethical person have continued to orient townspeople in Sepych over the course of nearly three centuries for specific, identifiable, and often unexpected reasons. Throughout, he demonstrates what a historical and ethnographic study of ethics might look like and uses this approach to ask new questions of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history.
A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story
In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian ...Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called "the simple" in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history.
What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East.
This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.
The historical interaction between Muslims and their non-Muslim subjects and neighbors is a topic of interest for many scholars who are interested in the potential for positive interreligious ...coexistence past and present. Several recent books speak to different aspects of this relationship with a particular focus on Christians living under the rule of the early Muslims. These include Jack Tannous’s The Making of the Medieval Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2018), a broad look at the transition from Christian to Muslim rule in the region, and Christian Sahner’s Christian Martyrs under Islam (Princeton University Press, 2020), which focuses more specifically on the phenomenon of martyrdom. In line with the more tightly contained scope of the latter work, Bradley Bowman’s new book takes a close look at Christian monks in the Middle East and their interactions with the new societal structures and ideologies of Islam.
This article is the first attempt to study the representations of Christmas slavleniya (praises) of the Russian Lipovans of Romania on social networks. The Russian Lipovans of Romania are a community ...of Russian Old Believers living on the territory of Romania mainly in the regions of Dobruja and Tulcea. Lipovans have cultural peculiarities, specific customs, and practices, one of which is Christmas glorification, consisting of singing fragments of the Christmas Church Service of the Old Believers. A similar custom is also observed among the Russian Old Believers of Moldova and Ukraine. Currently, members of the Russian Lipovans community of Romania have been recording the praises taking place in homes or public places on video and posting them on social networks and on various Internet platforms. The relevance of the topic is related to the need to study the impact of new technologies on the maintenance and distribution of traditional culture, which is especially important for small communities. The purpose of the article is to highlight and analyze the characteristic features of the representation of Christmas greetings of the Lipovans of Romania on the Internet. Accordingly, the following tasks have been identified: 1) consider the influence of historical circumstances on the formation of traditional culture of Christmas celebrations by the Old Believers of Romania; 2) collect and describe examples of the representation of Christmas praises of the Russian Lipovans of Romania on the Internet and analyze the specifics and the socio-cultural context of their existence; 3) highlight the key features of this practice compared to similar customs of the Old Believers of Moldova and Ukraine. The research methodology was compiled by a comprehensive cultural approach based on the use of historical-genetic, hermeneutic, and comparative-analytical methods, as well as cyberethnography approaches. The study has found that the Russian Lipovans of Romania living in a different ethnic and confessional environment actively represent on their pages in social networks and private channels on YouTube the tradition of Christmas praises that exists in their community, which partly contributes to its reproduction and reconstruction. The results have enabled the author to conclude that the praises of the Lipovans of Romania, colindă, should not be confused with Christmas carols as they closely follow the canon and represent both a well-preserved variation of home worship and a specific practice of communication.
О русских староверах-поповцах (филипонах/липованах) в Румынии известно давно. В то же время материалов о филипповцах-беспоповцах на территории этой страны практически нет. Цель настоящей статьи – на ...основе анализа филипповских рукописных источников и румынских историко-краеведческих материалов ввести в научный оборот новые данные о существовании беспоповского филипповского скита в Северной Добрудже во второй половине ХIХ в. В работе использованы сравнительный, описательный, интерпретационный и др. методы исследования.
В нескольких филипповских рукописях упоминается неизвестная ранее «Кителештская пустыня», находящаяся «за Дунаем». Данные, обнаруженные в филипповских документах и румынских исследованиях и справочниках, позволяют отождествлять «Кителештскую пустыню» с беспоповским монастырем в дер. Тикилешти, расположенной на правом берегу Дуная в жудеце Тульча. На данный момент у нас имеются сведения о 12 насельниках этого скита, живших там в разное время, видимо, приблизительно с середины 1850-х до конца (или, по крайней мере, до середины) 1870-х гг. В начале ХХ в. скит в Тикилешти прекратил свое существование, а на его месте был основан лепрозорий.
The article discusses the revival and development of the problems of the Orthodox monastic communities in the Russian North after the destructive processes of secularization. The main part of the ...monasteries activity in the review period fell on the time of significant changes in the public consciousness caused by bourgeois reforms. In this regard, the significance of Orthodox monasteries as a stronghold of spirituality and Christian norms of life increased noticeably. The main attention in the article is paid to the problems of the internal life of Orthodox monasteries: economic processes, norms and features of the management of monasteries, the internal structure of monastic communities, control over their activities by the spiritual authorities.
God Sead Alić
In medias res (Zagreb, Online),
09/2023, Volume:
12, Issue:
23
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This text and this approach seek to draw attention to the forms of human mediation of the idea of God; to the death of the media in which God has revealed himself, which coincides with the loss of ...confidence in the idea of God, which is too human. In this sense, there is talk of an ‘earthly God’ who serves various interest groups as an excuse to act or not act. The idea of God returned to his barbaric presence in the lives of our peoples. The sky is divided. God has become an excuse for idols and their institutions, gods among men. It is up to the true believers to try to unite heaven and try to hear heaven with some new medium.
The article deals with the main regularities of the formation and evolution of the tradition of making processions in the European North of Russia. It is revealed that by the end of the 18th century ...there was a stable tradition of organizing church processions. Documents show that processions were performed in connection with holidays and other significant events of everyday peasant life, the past of confessional communities. The participation of state bodies in the processions of the cross was taken into account in the protection of law and order. On the part of the Church authorities, only the collection of statistical information on processions of the cross is noted.
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