Iron Curtain Christians: The Church in Communist Countries Today. By Kurt Hutten. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1967. 495 pp. $10.00

The paper provides a study of religious lexis excerpted from the Russian translation of the encyclical letter Laudato si’. The Russian version of the encyclical was translated and published by Russian Franciscan Publishing House. The analyzed material consisting of single words, as well as compound multi-word expressions, related to the Catholic denomination (264 lexical items – 1000 uses, which accounts for 14% of the entire encyclical), was grouped into semantic fields. The vocabulary was described in terms of the semantics and its functioning and codification, both in the contemporary Russian religious language and in general Russian language. It was assumed that the encyclical is addressed not only to the representatives of the Church hierarchy but also to all the faithful. Hence, there was the need to draw attention to the pragmatic aspects of the religious language, including the balance between comprehensibility and the use of specialist theological terminology in the translated text. It was demonstrated that the majority of the lexical items of religious terminology is coded by the explanatory dictionary of the contemporary Russian language, except for 14 lexical items related to the Catholic denomination that enhance the lexis of the contemporaryRussian language.

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East of the “Iron Curtain”: Why Did Post-Communist Countries Join NATO?

Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences ◽

10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n27p1421 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Tatiana P. Rizova

Keyword(s):

Iron Curtain ◽

Communist Countries

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Inconvenient National Discourse and the People Who Walk to Hear It: the Case of the Slovak National Pilgrimage

Journal of Religion Media and Digital Culture ◽

10.1163/21659214-00801003 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

pp. 35-54

Author(s):

Alexander Bielicki

Keyword(s):

Catholic Church ◽

Religious Practice ◽

East Central Europe ◽

East Central ◽

Audience Reaction ◽

The People ◽

Media Constructions ◽

The Media ◽

Communist Countries ◽

The Church

The presence of nationalism in the Catholic Church, ostensibly global in its mission and outlook, has been a contentious issue especially in the post-communist countries of East-Central Europe. Events like the Slovak national pilgrimage to Šaštín, broadcast across the country on television, radio and internet, offer Catholic elite in Slovakia a rare chance to freely weave national history and national devotion into religious practice and discourse, but what does elite discourse actually tell us about the production and reproduction of nationhood in the Church? This article calls for increased exploration of reception of elite discourse in the media, not only to gauge audience reaction, but to better understand how the would-be recipients of these messages play a role in producing, reproducing or contesting these media constructions of national identity.

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Practical Theology in Slovakia

International Journal of Practical Theology ◽

10.1515/ijpt-2017-0037 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 21 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Július Filo

Keyword(s):

Practical Theology ◽

Roman Catholic ◽

Protestant Reformation ◽

Iron Curtain ◽

Religious Minority ◽

Social Ministry ◽

International Report ◽

Congregational Ministry ◽

Evangelical Lutheran ◽

The Church

AbstractThis International Report on Practical Theology in Slovakia focuses on the case of practical theology in The Evangelical Church of Augsburg Confession in Slovakia, a religious minority in a mostly Roman Catholic country. Although the church dates to the Protestant Reformation, its understanding of practical theology is about one hundred years old. The article sketches the most important developments in the field since 1919, mainly induced by the far-reaching political upheavals after the two World Wars, as well as the opening of the Iron Curtain in 1989. After the period of repression of religion by the state during the communist era, the “velvet revolution” in 1989 opened an almost unlimited room for the churches’ mission in Slovak society: new possibilities and challenges for building church communities, developing congregational ministry, and involving the church in educational, cultural and social ministry. The venue in which practical theology has been developing is the Evangelical Lutheran Theological Faculty of Comenius University in Bratislava.

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