The Russian Orthodox Church and atheism

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the religious tide in Russia has been quick to rise. During the Soviet era, religion – particularly Orthodox Christianity and Islam – was considered to be one of the ‘enemies of the people’. Since the late 1990s however, Russian politicians at all levels of the power structure have associated themselves either with the Orthodox, or on some occasions with the Muslim, clergy. The present state of affairs in the relations between religion and the state are well illustrated by the cordial liaison of the late Patriarch Aleksii II with President Vladimir Putin and the equally warm involvement of President Dmitry Medvedev, and his wife Svetlana Medvedeva, with the new Patriarch Kirill, who was elected in January 2009. Some have even argued that ‘today’ (in 2004) the Church and state are so extensively intertwined that one can no longer consider Russia to be a secular state. Polls seem to support the claim. While in 1990 only 24 per cent of Russians identified themselves as Orthodox, in the sense that they felt themselves to be Russians as well, in 2008 the number was 73 per cent. However, less than 10 per cent, and in Moscow perhaps only 2 per cent do actually live out their religiosity.Why did Russia turn towards religion? Is religion chosen in an attempt to legitimise power, or in order to consolidate political rule after atheist-communist failure? My guess is that the answer to both is affirmative. Moreover, whatever the personal convictions of individual Russians, including politicians, religious, mainly Orthodox Christian, rhetoric and rituals are used to make a definitive break with the communist past and to create, or re-create, a Greater Russia (see Simons 2009). In such an ideological climate, atheism has little chance of thriving, whereas there is a sort of ‘social demand’ for its critique.I therefore focus on what the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has had to say about atheism and how her statements can be related to a break with the past and the construction of a new Russia. Or, in my opinion, actually deleting the Soviet period from the history of Russia as an error and seeing present-day Russia as a direct continuation of the pre-Soviet imperial state

From Reality to Subject: A Sympathetic, Yet Critical Reading of Eliade

Mircea Eliade is, or at least has been, the most heavily crticised scholar of religions. A number of critics have been discontented with his 'uncritical' way of using data to illustrate or assert his insights. It has been said that Eliade's presuppositions about the nature of reality and religion are not scientific but metaphysical or theological. Eliade's sympathisers, on the other hand, have tried to show that he does after all have a method, and that a careful reading demonstrates that either his presuppositions are no more unscientific that those of anyone else or they can be rethought in a scientifically acceptable way. My starting point is both sympathetic and critical. My question is, what is Eliade actually attempting to understand when he states that he wants to understand religion at its own level? He himself states that he wants to unmask the 'revelations' of the sacred, or - as he also says - the transcendent, and their significance for modern man, who has lost his comprehension of both the sacred and its meaning. This he can do, he argues, by recapturing the way in which 'primitive' and 'archaic' cultures and ancient and modern traditions outside mainstream religions have used symbols to establish a patterned, harmonised view of the world, or - as Eliade prefers to say - reality. Both Eliade's critics and his sympathisers presumably agree that Eliade's presuppositions include statements about the 'essence' of religion, about the nature of reality, and about the ways religion operates, or should operate, in human life, or mode-of-being-in-the-world; they also agree that one of Eliade's main concern in religious studies is with symbols. In my article, I deal with these four points (essence, reality, mode-of-being and symbols), proposing a reading of Eliade which emphasises the scholar's encounter with the subject and not the 'essence' of the matter under study. In my conclusion I suggest that studying the ways in which humans use symbols, which they connect with the 'real' to construct a 'mode-of-being' - or, as William Paden put it, a 'world' - is one way of going 'beyond' Eliade

Hilma Granqvist eller Sitt Halima: en bortglömd vetenskapskvinna och etnolog

Recension av: Häggman, Sofia: Hilma Granqvist – antropolog med hjärtat i Palestina. SFV:s biografiserie nr 11. Svenska folkskolansvänner, Helsingfors 2016. 345 s., illustrerad, personindex

Itä-Ukraina, Venäjä, Nato ja ”länsi”

Arvioitu teos: Juha-Antero Puistola & Johanna Suhonen: Itä-Ukraina, lännen etuvartio. Docendo 2020. 240 s., kuvitettu. ISBN 952-291-824-6

HEALER, WELFARE AND ‘LIMITED GOOD’ IN ORTHODOX FINNISH BORDER KARELIA IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY AND EARLY 20TH CENTURY

The article introduces to readers the activities of healers among the Finnish Orthodox people of Border Karelia (located on the northern shores of Lake Ladoga). The period discussed here focuses on the two decades between the First and the Second World War. The activities of healers consisted of finding and explaining a problem (usually the cause of an illness), and finding a solution. In Border Karelia, the most common explanations for an illness were that it had come from water, a forest or a graveyard. It was believed that all three were controlled by spirits, which the ill person had somehow offended, or, occasionally, which had been set on the ill person by somebody malicious. In both cases, the ill person’s share of limited good had diminished, and had to be enhanced. In the first case, the spirit(s) had to be conciliated. In the latter case, a counter-charm was needed.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15181/ab.v15i1.2