Publications

Anotace

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of atheism, secularity and non-religion in Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In contrast to scholarship that has focused on the ‘decline of religion’ and secularization theory, the book builds upon recent trends to focus on the ‘rise of non-religion’ itself. While the label of ‘post-communism’ might suggest a generalized perception of the region, this survey reveals that the precise developments in each country before, after and even during the communist era are surprisingly diverse.

A multinational team of contributors provide interdisciplinary case studies covering Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria. This approach utilises perspectives from social and intellectual history in combination with sociology of religion in order to cover the historical development of

secularity and secular thought, complemented with sociological data. The study is framed by methodological and analytical chapters.

Offering an important geographical perspective to the study of freethought, atheism, secularity and non-religion, this wide-ranging book will be of significant interest to scholars of twentieth-century social and intellectual history, sociology of religion and non-religion, cultural and religious studies, philosophy and theology.

Anotace

The book focuses on the history and identity of Namibian Czechs, originally a group of prominent child war refugees admitted by the Czechoslovak government in 1985 for education as an expression of international solidarity assistance to SWAPO liberation movement. The educational project with elements of social engineering was interrupted in 1991 due to political changes in both countries. The relocation of the children to Namibia had a dramatic impact on their future lives. Namibian Czechs never fully integrated into Namibian society; moreover they proudly proclaim their belonging to Czechness.

Anotace

This publication has several modest goals: We shall describe how we conceptualised religious memory for the purposes of qualitative and quantitative survey research, and we shall explain how we operationalised religious communicative and cultural memory and why we believe that the questionnaire we designed and present here can also be applied in other contexts outside Czech society. Given the volume of data we obtained, we want to present at least a portion of our results and show what types of findings were achieved through our conceptualisation and operationalisation of religious memory. Finally, we want to present non-Czech-speaking readers with a comprehensive work describing changes in religiosity in Czech society, in this case from the perspective of memory studies. In other words, we want to offer an international audience a piece of work broader than just a journal article focusing on the study of religion in the Czech Republic.

Přestože multikulturalismus jako koncept v rámci humanitních studií představuje už poněkud vyčerpané téma, chceme vymezit prostor, který v rámci multikulturního přístupu v české společnosti zůstává dosud nenaplněn. Naším cílem je upozornit na možnosti znovu-promyšlení multikulturní ideologie na bázi kritického přístupu k ní a na možnosti její aplikace do sfér výchovy a vzdělávání. Chceme ukázat, jak přehnaná akcentace etnické diferenciace znehodnocuje cíle multikulturalismu založené na spravedlivém přístupu i napříč jinými typy odlišností. Pokud nevytyčíme možnosti, jak mluvit o ideách multikulturalismu bez zúžení této problematiky na etnickou otázku, nemáme naději na přijetí multikulturní výchovy jako nezbytné součásti školního kurikula, jako platformy pro nové společenské paradigma.