Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective

The book argues that religion is a system of significant meanings that have an impact on other systems and spheres of social life, including cultural memory. The editors call for a postsecular turn in memory studies which would provide a more reflective and meaningful approach to the constant interplay between the religious and the secular. This opens up new perspectives on the intersection of memory and religion and helps memory scholars become more aware of the religious roots of the language they are using in their studies of memory. By drawing on examples from different parts of the world, the contributors to this volume explain how the interactions between the religious and the secular produce new memory forms and content in the heterogenous societies of the present-day world. These analyzed cases demonstrate that religion has a significant impact on cultural memory, family memory and the contemporary politics of history in secularized societies. At the same time, politics, grassroots movements and different secular agents and processes have so much influence on the formation of memory by religious actors that even religious, ecclesiastic and confessional memories are affected by the secular. This volume is ideal for students and scholars of memory studies, religious studies and history. Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Contents List of figures Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Foreword 1 Introduction: memory and religion from a postsecular perspective Part I Memory and religion: theoretical considerations 2 Religion and collective memory of the last century: general reflections and Russian vicissitudes 3 Sacred religio-secular symbols, national myths and collective memory Part II Postsecularity and politics of memory 4 The Armenian genocide: extermination, memory, sacralization 5 Building a patrimonial Church: how the Orthodox Churches in Ukraine use the past 6 ‘God is in truth, not in power!’ the re-militarization of the cult of St Alexander Nevsky in contemporary Russian cultural memory 7 The martyrdom of Jozef Tiso: the entanglements of the sacred and secular in post-war Catholic memories 8 Remembering and enforced forgetting: the dynamics of remembering Cardinal József Mindszenty in the Cold War decades Part III Post-conflict memories 9 Evocation and the June Fourth Tiananmen candlelight vigil: a ritual-theological hermeneutics 10 Religious echoes of the Donbas conflict: the discourses of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities in Ukraine 11 Official quests, vernacular answers: the Macedonian Orthodox Church – Ohrid Archbishopric (MOC-OA) as a memory actor in the post-conflict Republic of North Macedonia (2001–19) 12 Negotiating the sacred at non-sites of memory. The religious imaginary of post-genocidal society Part IV Media and postsecular memory 13 The Crimean Tatars’ memory of deportation and Islam 14 The Soviet past in contemporary Orthodox hymnography and iconography 15 Whose Church is it? the nonreligious use of religious architecture in Eastern Germany Part V Transnational and vernacular memories 16 The political use of the cult of St Tryphon of Pechenga and its potential as a bridge-builder in the Arctic 17 ‘Vernacular’ and ‘official’ memories: looking beyond the annual Hasidic pilgrimages to Uman 18 Memory as a religious mission? religion and nation in local commemoration practices in contemporary Poland 19 Critical juxtaposition in the post-war Japanese mnemoscape: Saint Maksymilian Kolbe of Auschwitz and the atomic bomb victims of Nagasaki Afterword: from Religion as a Chain of Memory to memory from a postsecular perspective Index "The book argues that religion is a system of significant meanings that have an impact on other systems and spheres of social life including cultural memory. The editors call for a postsecular turn in memory studies which would provide a more reflective and meaningful approach to the constant interplay between the religious and the secular. This opens up new perspectives on the intersection of memory and religion and helps memory scholars become more aware of the religious roots of the language they are using in their studies of memory. By drawing on examples from different parts of the world, the contributors to this volume explain how the interactions between the religious and the secular produce new memory forms and content in the heterogenous societies of the present-day world. These analysed cases demonstrate that religion has a significant impact on cultural memory, family memory and the contemporary politics of history in secularized societies. At the same time, politics, grassroots movements and different secular agents and processes have so much influence on the formation of memory by religious actors that even religious, ecclesiastic and confessional memories are affected by the secular. This volume is ideal for students and scholars of memory studies, religious studies and history"-- Provided by publisher