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Abstract
This article represents the results of analysis of data on religion for all of the countries of the world which appear in the World Religion Database (Johnson and Grim 2023). Data was collected at the national level from a number of sources including censuses, surveys, polls, religious communities, scholars, and others. After data collection and analysis, discrepancies were worked out and best estimates are made for each religion across a number of years. Results are presented for religionists and non-religionists as a whole as well as for each religious and non-religious category.
Abstract
In this paper I explore some of the roles that education can and needs to play in supporting “the great socio-ecological transition”, with particular emphasis on adult and vocational education and training. After briefly outlining some of the facets of the current pluricrisis, I examine a set of intersecting debates about transformation and transition(s) towards a more sustainable future, which is necessarily also more just. In this analysis, I build beyond the social science traditions usually evoked in these debates to draw on Catholic analyses of the nature of the problem. Catholic Social Teaching began with a concern about the effects of the transition to industrialisation, with Rerum Novarum (published by Pope Leo XIII in 1891), and increasingly has sought to address the need for the next transition beyond the Capitalocene, especially in Laudato Si’ (published by Pope Francis in 2015). It has always placed workers, work and learning at its core. Thus, there is much potentially to be gained from bringing together conventional educational research perspectives on education for sustainable development and education for human development with a Catholic Social Teaching lens in thinking about the possible roles for education in supporting just transitions.
Abstract
The chapter tackles the patterns of religion and identity in the Balkans with a special emphasis on Bulgaria to foreground the concept of secularities instead of the “fixed” notion of a single path of secularism matching the classical Western ideal. Discussing the religious underpinnings of Balkan secularities and the lack thereof, we draw on Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities, which marked a new way of using the term “imagined” in understanding politics and political action. Anderson’s concept is straightforward, arguing that ideas of political community are not given but are actively constructed, and contested, by those who hold them, and historically situated. Anderson’s insightful term was readily expanded by analogy from describing how nations took shape to the analysis of religious experience—not only for Christians and Muslims but also for other faiths. There has been resistance to use of the term “imagined” because it suggests to some an unreality. However, as the chapter argues, the term highlights how social and political forms get shaped by individuals and collectivities to become social facts. The notion of politics as centered on power relations and interests alone cannot account for how members of a society interact, cooperate, and sustain social cohesion. Overt political struggle is framed by implicit understandings of belonging and, of course, the arbitrary enforcement of what is permitted and forbidden. Pursuing this struggle about people’s imaginations, the chapter elucidates the relevance of two concepts invoking both Byzantine and Ottoman notions implicitly underpinning modern politics—symphonic and milletic secularism.
Abstract
On 10 November 1989, the removal of Todor Zhivkov from the state and party leadership in Bulgaria marked the end of its Communist regime. In the religious sphere, the political change shook the decades-old monopoly of militant atheism, thus creating conditions for a return of religion to the public square. Among other things, this process stimulated a restitution of buildings and real estate which the Communist regime had taken away from religious communities. A set of laws adopted in the early 1990s instigated the mass return of arable lands, forests, industries as well as office and residential buildings to physical persons and judicial entities. Being major landholders before the Communist rule, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and the Muslim community benefited the most from this process.
In 2012, the restitution of the economically valuable tangible assets to religious denominations was over. Regarded as part of the restoration of historical justice, this process was generally welcomed by society in post-Communist Bulgaria. In 2013, however, people opposed the attempts of some political forces to spread the restitution over religious edifices ‘nationalized’ by the former totalitarian regime under the pretext of their preservation as monuments of national history and world cultural heritage. In this regard, Bulgarians faced difficulties that many contemporary secular societies have experienced in dealing with their religious cultural heritage. As this heritage bears special cultural and historical value for both the public and the sacred realms, the questions of its ownership and management often provoke tensions and conflicts between the corresponding religious institutions and the state authorities. In the case of post-atheist countries, this process is additionally complicated by the legacy of the totalitarian past. By presenting the debate of Bulgarian society over its religious cultural heritage, the chapter sheds light on this particular national case.