Scholarly Life

History of Russian Orthodoxy in the Age of Revolutions and Modernization: Review of an International Conference in Smolensk

The conference “Russian Orthodoxy from modernity to the present day (late 19th — late 20th centuries): projections of the Great Russian revolution in history and historiography” was held on June 15–17, 2018 at Smolensk State University. The conference was attended by more than 30 scholars from various academic centers of Russia, Belarus, Latvia, Poland and the USA.

Religion and Russian Revolution: Explicit and Implicit Relationships. A Conference Review

The conference “Religion and Russian Revolution” was held at the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) on October 26–28, 2017. The conference included 52 papers by scholars from 11 nations and many Russian cities. The best papers will be published in this journal, in the Russian language, and in an English-language volume by one of the Western publishers.

«Scientific Atheism» as a Case for Discussion (Responses of the Volume’s Authors to Reviews)

In their reactions to A. Kyrlezhev’s and M. Shakhnovich’s reviews, the authors of the volume under discussion provide further clarifications of key methodological issues. They stress that the volume pursued academic goals rather than engaging in a wider public debate. Speaking of the Soviet science of religion, they prefer the concept of «extreme science» instead of «pseudoscience» or «normal science in extreme conditions». The volume focused on creating a framework of understanding the phenomenon and did not claim to cover the variety of archival materials.

The Post-Soviet Transition and the Science of Religion

This text is an extended review of the volume «Science of Religion, Scientific Atheism, Religious Studies. Current Problems of the Science of Religion in 20th-21st centuries Russia » (editor K. Antonov, 2014). The review emphasizes the need of de-Sovietization of the religious studies that in the Soviet times existed under the rubric of «scientific atheism ». The volume’s authors were right to present the Soviet religious studies as an amalgam of scientific and non-scientific approaches and practices.

The Ethos of the History of Science: a Reconstruction of Religious Studies in Soviet Russia

The paper provides a review and reflections on the book «The Science of Religion, Scientific Atheism, Religious Studies: Issues of the Scientific Study of Religion in Russia in the Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century» (Ed. by K. M. Antonov, Moscow, 2014). The author of the review critically examines the volume in terms of the basic principles of the study of the history of science.

Conference: ‘“Lived Religion” in the USSR: Survival and Resistance Under Forced Secularization’

The conference held at the Russian State University of Humanities, Moscow, in February 2012, was the first event of such scale and scope to deal with the religious practices and the ‘lived religion’ in the entire Soviet period. About 80 papers from Russia, Ukraine and the West were based upon a variety of recent case studies in this new field of inquiry focused on everyday religiosity rather than State policies or reactions of religious institutions.