ritual

«Praying Youth» as a Subculture of the Kabardino-Balkar Society

The Exaltation of Holy Cross and the Deposition of the Emperor of Ethiopia: Lïj Iyasu and a Mäsqäl Drama

On September 16, 1916 the Ethiopian ruler Iyasu was excommunicated and deposed. Although there in a great deal of literature concerned with the local and international political forces behind this coup, its timing has been considered only in passing. This article focuses on the fact that this event coincided with the major Christian festival of Mäsqäl (The Festival of the Cross), an early Christian celebration, which was elevated to the de facto status of a major feast by the Ethiopian Church in the 15th century.

Constructing Ukrainian National Identity in the Subcarpathian Rus by the Greek Catholic Order of St. Basil (1919 – 1939)

For a long time historical Transcarpathia made part of the various countries. In a foreign cultural environment the local church developed a unique system of relations with the state, keeping intact the ritual-liturgical foundations, including Slavonic language. The article focuses on the reform of the Galician Basilians in Subcarpathian Rus, whose activity caused a collision of Ukrainian, Hungarian and Romanian nationalisms. It explores the particular ways of using the structures of the Basilian Order by the Galician monks for designing the Ukrainian identity in the region.

The Choreography of Cohabitation: Contemporary Sharing of Shrines in Macedonia

Cognitive Science and the Study of Religion

The paper discusses main aspects of modern cognitive science of religion. It shows that researchers, working within the cognitive frame based on naturalism and the theory of evolution, treat religion as a special form of cognitive activity and correlate the genesis of religion with the origin of consciousness and some special functions of its earliest forms.