Religion, Nation, and Secularization in Ukraine

Book excerpt: The book is a collection of scholarly essays about the interrelationships between religion and religious institutions, nations and nation building, and secularization. The book presents nine papers by eminent scholars from Ukraine, Austria, Canada, and the United States that examine a wide range of topics relating to the last four hundred years: religious culture and the role of clergy as agents of modernization; national identity and transnational religious phenomena; the relationship between sacred tongues and modern language formation; the interaction of secularizing trends with ritual and tradition; the interrelation of religious hierarchies and political movements; and popular belief in relation to religious dogma. The book focuses on Ukrainian territories, but attention is also drawn to Belarusian territories, inasmuch as the Ruthenian (i.e., Ukrainian and Belarusian) lands shared common religious and cultural institutions in the early modern period. The majority of the essays address Ukrainian or Eastern Christian religious formations, but other religious groups, such as Jews, are also discussed. In light of the modern-day globalization of Ukrainian religious groups and the rise of diasporas, some of the essays also cover Western Europe and the Americas. The original papers were delivered at an international conference, held in Munich in 2010, that was co-sponsored by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Munich); Charles University (Prague); the Ukrainian Free University (Munich); and the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta (Edmonton). Contributors: Kerstin S. Jobst, Burkhard Wöller, Michael Moser, Tobias Grill, Frank E. Sysyn, Liliana Hentosh, Oleh Pavlyshyn, Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Leonid Heretz.