As the final installment of the Fall 2018 book forum on The House of Government, forum co-curators Sonja Luehrmann and…
A conversation with Yuri Slezkine
Soviet Union
A matter of life and death
Opening his chapter on “The Faith” of Bolshevism (chapter 3), Yuri Slezkine writes that “The most obvious question about [the]…
A religious revolution?
As a historian—not a scholar of religion—specialized in Hungarian, Italian, and German history, I cannot say much about Yuri Slezkine’s…
Religion or ideology?
While I cannot nearly do justice here to Slezkine’s ambitious undertaking, I briefly touch upon two points to suggest why…
Millenarianism in the Soviet Union and Maoist China
As late modernizers, both Russian and Chinese societies urgently catapulted themselves into modernity, not through the gradual capitalist rationalization process…
Bolshevism as secular religion? A discussion of The House of Government
In order to expand the discussion of Slezkine’s study, we asked scholars of religion familiar with the Soviet and other…
Paul Froese featured in New Voices
The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) recently featured Paul Froese in their New Voices section, which recognizes leading scholars in…
Contradictions of religious freedom and religious repression
The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of seventy years of anti-religious policies---of a period in which religious…
The old Left, new Left, and new post-secular Left
One notable aspect of the post-secular world is the renewed interest in religion and theology amongst the once ultra-secular radical…
Hatred and humanism
“Some of our comrades conceive this humanism as though it were a young, fair-haired girl walking through a scented meadow,…