Quo Vadis Eastern Europe?

The book presents the newest research and thought on religion in Eastern Europe. The invited authors analyze the radically changed religious situation in the former communist countries and give some perspectives on the future of religious co-existence in the area. This volume provides accurate source material for scholars, area specialists, and students interested in the region. The invited authors, among the best internationally recognized scholars in the field, present sophisticated analysis of common religiously motivated patterns that have historically faced and are facing the region.

This important and timely new book, superbly edited by Ines Angeli Murzaku and with contributions from leading scholars in the field of Eastern European religion and ethnicity, deserves the widest possible readership. Theoretically sophisticated and historically acute, it offers a country-by-country analysis of one of the greatest challenges of the contemporary world: how to accommodate, within the new Europe, some of the oldest and most divisive tensions known to man. In considering the prospects for dialogue between and within religions in one part of modern Europe, this immensely solid volume asks profound questions about the nature of modernity itself. (Dermot Quinn, Professor of History at Seton Hall University, USA)

The book is a critically needed contribution to a vastly neglected area. The major religion of Eastern Europe is, of course, Orthodox Christianity. Westerners tend to be almost totally ignorant of its present, let alone its history, and the fact that Eastern Europe was the cradle of Christianity, and indeed of Europe itself! Much of Eastern Europe has today already been incorporated in the European Union, and most of the rest of it is on its future docket. However, much of the history and current situation of the melange of religions and cultures of the region is largely terra incognita. The authors-all specialists-shed much needed light on this bubbling cauldron. Professor Ines Angeli Murzaku has rendered a great service in bringing them together in this volume. We Westerners would do well to follow the command sent to our fellow Westerner, Augustine: Tolle, lege! (Leonard Swidler, Professor of Catholic Thought and Interreligious Dialogue, Temple University, USA)