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The article presents the organization and activities of the Croatian cultural society "Napredak" in Croatian littoral and Gorski kotar region from 1928 to 1950.
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The article deals with plans of Slovenian intellectual Frano Ilešić about the relations between the central European countries.
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The article presents the collaboration between two Croatian cultural society in the literacy campaign (1937-1941)-
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The study reveals and analyses the most significant historical sources about the religious activity and the death of Constantin Brâncoveanu, the ruler of Wallachia. Our investigation is focused on the execution of the Romanian sovereign, ordered by the Sultan Ahmed III, in 1714, and it is based on the informations from the witnesses’ testimonies on the tragic event. Also, we intend to outline the main directions of his religious activity. First, we noticed the abundance of sources, as the bloody and cruel execution shocked and horrified the witnesses and also the press of the time. The informal notes of the Dutch, French or German ambassadors to Istanbul, reporting the events, also insist on the period of the imprisonment, during which Brâncoveanu and his family were tortured in order to disclose their fortune. The historical sources reveal the possibility offered to Constantin Brâncoveanu to save his life by converting to Islam, an opportunity which was repeatedly turned down by the Romanian ruler. As if all this was not enough, the sons were killed, one by one, in front of their father, who was encouraging them not to abandon their Orthodox faith. Under the given circumstances, his death was a real martyrdom, for Brâncoveanu preferred death to apostasy. He was praised as a martyr soon after his death and a beautiful akathist hymn was written in his honour by the metropolitan of Heracleea and the future Ecumenical Patriarch, Calinic. The martyrdom of the Romanian ruler crowned a life dedicated to Orthodoxy. His constant activity of supporting the Orthodoxy was achieved by several specific methods. He had built churches and monasteries all over the Orthodox world, in the Romanian Principalities and also in Oriental countries, which were under Muslim government. Constantin Brâncoveanu endowed the churches with estates, money, religious books and objects and liturgical vestments as well. He established in Wallachia, Transylvania and also in Oriental places, as Alep for example, printing houses where important liturgical and apologetical books were printed.
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Today, in an increasingly troubled world, the contemporary man can find in the words and counsels of the Fathers remedies to many ontological worries and to its existential anxieties. Their efficiency is even greater since they are not the exclusive product of the human mind, of the power’s penetration or introspection of a therapist, however well he is trained, nor of the techniques for abyssal sounding of the unconscious, but they have the role of healing and redemptive works. Saint John Cassian, a profound theologian and a perfect teacher of the Christian ascetic life, combines the positive wisdom of Rome with Greek intellectualism, focused on practical life, giving to us words „filled with power”, able to reveal us the true meanings of life and the ontological reasons of the world, „anchoring us” in God and the rich spiritual world.
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Many of Saint Gregory Palama’s Homilies cannot be dated precisely. Some were delivered during the Liturgy, others during the all-night vigils, but for some the date of these sermons remains unknown. The study proposes an analysis of the theological, historical and political context in which they were uttered, based on historical datas provided either by the text of the Homilies, or by different mentions from editors.
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Man’s bipolar constitution has served throughout the centuries as an analogy for the manner in which the divine and the human were united in Christ the Lord, the Son of God and the Son of Man. Based on an idea expressed by Apollinaris of Laodicea, this analogy served as the theoretical basis both for Chalcedonians and for non-Chalcedonians, as a source of arguments illustrating various Christological views. With St. Maximus the Confessor, the debate around the possibility of using this analogy to explain the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word came to an end. Hermeneutically speaking, any analogy is limited and limiting in relation to the object or the subject to which one refers. Respecting the Mystery, St. Maximus discovers circumscrivable truth, in so far as this is possible to man, as the starting point of the Incarnation. A scientific exegesis and prayer as encounter with the One who became incarnate for the sake of mankind’s salvation, the solution of St. Maximus represents a model of dialogue in Truth on inconvenient yet highly topical issues.
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In the Gospel of Lukethere are several quotations from Isaiah's prophecy, which are adapted to the cultural and historical context of Jesus' time. The first three explicit quotations of the Gospel follow a Hellenistic line of thought, expressed in the form of chiasmus. The citations are focused on Messiah and John the Baptist, following the reasoning used by Luke in order to find, through dialogue indirectly, the relation between these two prophets of the New Testament.
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Following the decentralising process in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of all the Italian cities seized by the freedom of self-expressing, one city would stand out by its unparalleled cultural brilliance – Florence. In the „capital” of thinking and arts of Renaissance Italy, a Florentine friar appeared – Girolamo Savonarola, a tempestuous personality, who undertook both a prophetic and a political role. Hence, the upcoming conflict between him and the Borgia Pope, Alexander, ended in the friar’s being sentenced in 1498 to death by pyre. Savonarola has remained a controversial character ever since: convicted as an heretic by Pope Alexander VI, rehabilitated by other pontiffs, regarded by Luther as a forerunner of the Protestant Reform and as a saint by many neoprotestants, many an honest historians and theologians still consider him a reformer of morals in the Roman Catholic Church, yet a reformer who overstepped the bounds of his relationships with his superior.
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Orthodox iconography renders precisely the education of the Church about Christ the Saviour, about the Mother of God or any other of the saints. The icon is a calling (from the Latin term vocatus meaning „to call”, „to cry”), which means that those who „make” an icon have to gave a special calling to holiness. The Church distinguishes in the concept of “vision” the common part from the metaphysical part, by contemplating what is not seen in what is seen, and it contemplates the eternal in the ephemeral. Along these lines we can affirm that the true icon expresses the spiritual experience of holiness. There are two dialogue axes in the icon: the first one represents the dialogue between the icon painter and God, which is the communication that generates the other axis, the secondary one, of the brother who will approach the icon and communicate to God, too.
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The contestation of the originality of the Fathers led some modern exegets, as A.J. Festugière, in asserting the prevalence of Platonism in their mysticism, though himself stresses the inadequacy of the grace notion in Platon’s mysticism. Starting with Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius the Christian Theology heads towards the theme of the Divine darkness – a theme without parallel in Platonism, a real originality in mysticism. Another challenge addressed to patristics comes from Adolf von Harnack, who insisted on the „Hellenism” of the Fathers. George Florovsky made an insistent pleading for the meaning/notion of „Christian Hellenism”, showing how Greek patristic thinking has avoided its closure into Greek philosophical systems, the heresies being nothing but an uncritical absorption of pagan Greek philosophy in the Christian understanding. H. Schäder is much more positive when he says that „the Christianization of Aristotelian logic in Byzantine theology” was made by changing the terms which are related: a fundamental Platonic idea of participation (methexis) with a central Aristotelian notion of energy, of updating (energeia) introduced by Aristotle in opposition to the Platonic scheme. The tradition of "Christian" textbooks of logic from the eighth century was an eclectic one, without going back to the original sources. Father John I. Ica jr. captures at St. John Damascene a middle way between Platonism’s essentialism and existentialist personalism. Methodios Fouyas shows how Palamas was himself „methodologically an Aristotelian one”, but „ontologically a Platonist”. In the West, on the other hand, the tomasian synthesis between Augustinian Neoplatonism and arabic Aristotelianism made A.D. Sertillanges to exclaim: „Thomas is more Aristotelian than Aristotle”. Finally, the twentieth century was, par excellence, the century of „Christian philosophy" as hermeneutics, but, as Marion shows, the definition of „Christian philosophy” proposed by Gilson can be read „not only as hermeneutics, but first and at the same time as heuristic”.
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Church-state relations in Slovenia in the nineties are in an era of battle for cultural hegemony, which neither side has yet won. The main issues of dispute are religious instruction and the return of non-ecclesiastic church property, mainly vast compounds of forests. At the end of 1997 the battle continues, with neither side being destined for a full-fledged victory.
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review of: Milan Antić, "Medical Sociology (Conceptual and Historical Survey)", Grafosrem, Sid, 1998, page 1 - 113.
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In general, Bulgarian Gypsies are Eastern Orthodox Christians and Moslems — the two mainstream religions in Bulgaria. Today a heavy influence is exercized by the different Protestant denominations (often considered "sects" in Bulgaria), and certain evangelical churches recruiting among the Gypsies. The proposed paper will look at the Relations of Ethnic and Confessional Consciousness of Gypsies in Bulgaria. Under the influence of the practised religion and the manifestations of preferred ethnic self-consciousness traditional hierarchy of Gypsies in Bulgaria, is changed, groups are rearranged. A change of religion or the conversion to a new religion is often seen as a possibility to seek a new place in the overall structure of the surrounding society, to adjust to new conditions, to find an outlet from the crisis in one's own ethnic body; under Balkan conditions (where ethnic and religious identity often are confused) this could be also a way to change one's own ethnic attribution. This trend indicates moreover the existence of an attempted modification in the group mechanism of social life through substitution with new patterns and rapprochement to the dominant standards of the macro-society. In any case, religion continues till today to perform its function of integrating and segregating, i.e. it is instrumental in the integration of the Gypsy groups into the Roma meta-group communities and sets them apart from other subdivisions of the Gypsy people.
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With the dramatic collapse of atheistic socialism at the end of the 1980s, it was widely assumed that religious freedom would immediately spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe and that new democratic and pluralistic states would replace the oppressive regimes of the past. Soon, however, it became apparent that neither democracy nor pluralism were without their own inherent difficulties, and that religious freedom was not as easy to implement ? or even, perhaps, as desirable as had once been thought. This paper examines some of the problems that faced the Mother Churches of Eastern and Central Europe once they were allowed to function without State interference in their own societies, and how their problems were intensified by the competition from other religions that emerged in their own countries and, more particularly, came from the West. Especial attention will be paid to the characteristics of the wide variety of new religious movements or 'cults', and the reception that missionaries and converts have been receiving. One process to be examined is the extent to which the rhetoric of nationalism has become increasingly used to define heresy as treason. The paper will conclude with a brief discussion of the importance of objective research and scholarship as a contribution to the understanding of the new and alien religious movements if an extremely delicate situation is not to become exacerbated still further.
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Religions are of a key importance for the meaningful construction and constituiting of the societies which they are embedded in. In the traditional societies this is obvious in a most direct way. In the secularized (modern) societies this function of the religions is most often too mediate and in many cases it is even expressed through derivatives. For instance, a large portion of people in the national societies and ethnic groups in the Balkans nowadays are not religious in the meaning of believers but as a rule they determine themselves as Orthodox Christians, Moslems, Catholic, etc. on the basis of their belonging to the respective traditional religion. For historical and geopolitical reasons there are neighbourhoods of various religious communities in the Balkans. From a typological point of view the study of the neighbourhood and its classification embrace a considerable variety of this type of relations. The religious belonging is mirrored in all the aspects of the polydimensional phenomenon of neighbourhood. The negative experience piled up throughout the historical developments in the Balkans brings forward the acute problem of "Kolakovski" which can be projected in respect to each and everyone of the traditional religions as well as to the newly born religious movements. The report focuses on the problems which arise along the path from the attitude towards "the other" in the meaning of "the hostile", "the antagonistic other" to the constituting of good neighbourliness.
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