The Yakunin vs. Dvorkin Trial and the Emerging Religious Pluralism in Russia

This article examines the sociological and historical context of an important legal case which took place in 1997 in Moscow and involved so called sects and cults operating in Russia. The case was a libel action brought against Alexander Dvorkin, a functionary of the Moscow Patriarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, who had published some extremely damning material about a number of newer and smaller faiths in Russia. The plaintiff was the Committee for Protection of Human Rights, headed by noted Soviet dissident, Father Gleb Yakunin. The article discusses the court proceedings in a wider socio-historical context, showing the ways in which this case revealed some important aspects of the contemporary religious situation in Russia, and in particular the controversies over legitimacy of new religious phenomena. This involves an analysis of ideological and socio-political resources available to the competing sides, types of evidence presented by them to the court, and the impact of these on the judiciary. Finally, the discussion and conclusion show that the development of religious pluralism in Russia is an outcome of a complex relationship between the country\u27s sociohistorical legacy, including its legal culture, the present political and cultural trends, and the contradictory impact of the West

Aesthetic and spiritual values of ecosystems: recognising the ontological and axiological plurality of cultural ecosystem 'services'.

This paper explores spiritual and aesthetic cultural values associated with ecosystems. We argue that these values are not best captured by instrumental or consequentialist thinking, and they are grounded in conceptions of nature that differ from the ecosystem services conceptual framework. To support our case, we engage with theories of the aesthetic and the spiritual, sample the discourse of ‘wilderness’, and provide empirical evidence from the recent UK National Ecosystem Assessment Follow-on Phase. We observe that accounts of spiritual and aesthetic value in Western culture are diverse and expressed through different media. We recognise that humans do benefit from their aesthetic and spiritual experiences of nature. However, aesthetic and spiritual understandings of the value of nature lead people to develop moral responsibilities towards nature and these are more significant than aesthetic and spiritual benefits from nature. We conclude that aesthetic and spiritual values challenge economic conceptions of ecosystems and of value (including existence value), and that an analysis of cultural productions and a plural-values approach are needed to evidence them appropriately for decision-making

Reconsidering Radicalisation and Terrorism

Shterin Marat. Reconsidering Radicalisation and Terrorism [Электронный ресурс] : the New Muslims Movement in Kabardino-Balkaria and its Path to Violence / Marat Shterin, Akhmet Yarlykapov// Religion, State and Society. - 2011. - Vol. 39, № 2/3. - P. 303-325