The article describes how the closure of churches during the Easter period due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the quarantine measures led to the shift: of everyday liturgical and communication practices to online forms. The experience of distance church life” in April-June 2020 has shown that both the mediatization of Orthodoxy and the development of Orthodox segment of the internet reached a fundamentally new stage. The author examines this stage using the concept of participatory culture introduced by Henry Jenkins and the cultural studies approaches based on the categories of interactivity and immersion. The shared experience of online worship over a span of several months and the degree of participants' co-presence and emotional involvement point to a new level of mediatization that entailed the production and consumption of textual, audio and video content in the course of vertical and horizontal communication. This experience also showed the active development of participatory practices, including the strengthening of interactivity of worship, the unprecedented intensity of immersion, and the prospects of substantial changes in the liturgical life driven by digitalization.

The article discusses the reactions within the Russian Orthodox Church to the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Based on materials from the press, religious and secular Internet-resources and online forums, the article systematizes the variety of responses of Orthodox priests, laity and church leaders to the unprecedented interruption of liturgical cycle and church sociality in the period of sanitary restrictions. The extraordinary challenges of the pandemic period revealed otherwise less obvious trends within the Orthodox milieu, and the nature of its ambivalent correlation with the basic epistemes of the late modern secular society.

The article examines various theological aspects of the perception of the coronavirus pandemic in the global Orthodoxy in general and the Russian Orthodox Church in particular. Among other aspects, it touches upon issues pertinent to the practices of celebration and distribution of the Eucharist under the conditions of hygienic restrictions. It also explores Christological arguments in support of each practice. The article proposes some particular interpretations of both phenomenology and etiology of the so-called Covid dissidence. It argues that artificial polarization on the ideological grounds between the so-called “liberals” and “conservatives” is one of the reasons why many bishops, priests, and lay people in the Russian Orthodox Church mistrust the quarantine measures.

This article examines the first reactions of the Russian Muslim community in the social networks to the spread of the coronavirus (mostly February-May 2020). We turn to the concepts of authority and legitimacy; the ideas of Brian Turner on the performative role of information technology for the institution of religious authority; Gary Bunt’s discussion of the democratization of Islamic knowledge in the online environment; Olivier Roy’s concept of individualization of Islam; and Peter Mandaville’s idea of decentralization of power in the Islamic tradition. This study seeks to answer two interrelated questions: who and how reinterprets the category of Islamic piety in the context of the pandemic and to what extent the online environment transforms the Islamic tradition as a whole. Based on textual analysis of individual publications on social networks and interviews with editors of public websites, the common narratives of Russian Muslim discourse on the pandemic were identified as follows: a retaliation against China for the oppression of Muslim Uighurs; the search for the signs of the coming doomsday; various approaches to the reinterpretation of religious piety. We suggest the term “popular” or “spontaneous” ijtihad to describe the variety of individualized strategies stimulated by the crisis. The construction of these strategies would not have been possible without the virtual environment, characterized by the polyarchic community of “online ulema” and the digitalization of religious practices.

The paper discusses a number of the most remarkable responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and to the social isolation measures coming from several, mostly ultra-Orthodox, Jewish communities in Israel, the United States, and Russia. It examines major elements of the crisis discourse, i.e., the hermeneutics of the causes and meanings of the pandemic; the affirmation of group borders and hierarchies as a result of the search for culprits; the relations between the religious community and the state; as well as the possible transformations of social behavior and ritual practices resulting from the crisis.

The article discusses the changes that have occurred in the ceremonies of the spirits cult in village communities of Vietnam during the COVID-ig pandemic and offers a case study of General Doàn Thuong’s (1181-1228) cult. I compare two ceremonies: commemoration of the General’s spirit in the temple in his native village in Hdi Duong province on May 1, 2018 (my own fieldwork) and a closed ceremony in the same temple which were broadcasted on the Internet on April 8, 2020. The feast in honor of a rural spirit, previously the most popular village event, was reduced to a ceremony with offerings and prayers in front of the altar which was performed by the representatives of Doàn clan. On the one hand, this version of the ceremony weakens the integration of the village community and eliminates such an important religious practice as pilgrimage. On the other hand, restrictive measures brought the ceremony closer to its traditional form: ordinary community members, women, tourists were excluded from participation in the rituals, while the Doàn clan’s members directly communicated with the spirits, the way it is prescribed by tradition.

This article discusses theoretical issues behind the current shift in the policy of European states towards Islamic communities. The shift: is driven by the idea that the values of political Islam are incompatible with Western values; that the main driver behind radicalization is ideology and that even non-violent Islamists gradually prepare the Muslim youth to embracing violence. Based on current academic discussions as well as the results of the author's own research, the author concludes that the opponents of these ideas have serious counterarguments. In their views, radicalization can be explained by a wide range of different factors. Violent and non-violent Islamists compete for the audience, and therefore, not only can non-violent Islamists embrace jihadist views but also, vice versa, some jihadists can change their position to non-violence. Moreover, Muslim values, as well as those of the Islamists, are not necessarily antagonistic in all their aspects with the values of Western democracies. Various theoretical approaches form the basis for an alternative program of practical measures that could be implemented in the future.

This article describes the new draft law on combating Islamist radicalism that has been negotiated in France over the past few months. The author compares three documents in which the parliamentary commission of the French Senate, the President, and the deputies of the National Assembly of France, respectively, presented their views on the problem. As the analysis shows, all three documents consider as a threat not only religiously motivated violence but also the very spread of radical ideology, which leads to the separation of certain Muslim communities from the rest of society and the promotion of social norms that contradict the “values of the Republic”. Both the deputies and President Macron proposed a package of measures, including increasing control over private schools and home education; strengthening the power of secret services and the prefects of departments (administrative regions); and banning foreign funding of religious organizations. The “republican values” that the bill aims to protect become mandatory for both government employees and for non-profit organizations applying for state subsidies. The paper then discusses the heated public debate over the new legislation.

The authors argue that the specificity of the Russian case of secularity is generally underestimated. This leads to two negative consequences. First, it leads researchers to considering the regimes of secularity in Eastern Europe as variations of the “Soviet model,” which is false. Second, it entails inaccuracies in the analysis of the regime of secularity that has developed in post-Soviet Russia that the authors propose to describe as “post-atheistic.” The special Russian case implied the destruction of the very mechanism of religious and cultural transmission during the period of communist rule. This is where other features of the post-atheistic society stem from: a relatively low relevance of religious symbols and narratives for the social fabric; the involvement of religious agency in the projects of nation-building and, therefore, a predominantly ideological, rather than religious, motivation of the subjects of such agency; a top-down, rather than bottom-up, dynamic of the post-Soviet return of religion to the public sphere; the lack of a broad public support of the state activities in this field; widespread polarization of views on the role of public religion in modern society - either linking religion to cultural backwardness, or the total rejection of modernity and secular culture.

The article concerns the changes in the definition of the word “priest” in encyclopedias and lexicographical works in the course of shaping of the European culture of Modernity. The article argues that the notion of sacrum (as related to God), which directly correlated with the position of priest and defined its meaning until the 17th century, later, through the 18th century, was replaced by the notion of the community, in which the priest performs some cultic Junctions. The definitions of Enlightenment partly discredited the priestly power and position often representing them as dangerous for society and contradicting the civic duty of the priest. This shift: is interpreted as reflecting the main changes in the modern worldview, when the hierarchical unity of social and cosmological orders was replaced by the functional understanding of society.

The article applies the Gnostic trope as the most suitable tool for analyzing religious components of contemporary mass culture. Christopher Partridge’s theory of occulture serves as a methodological framework. The Gnostic trope includes the following elements: the idea that our world is a prison created for the torment of man; that it is controlled by the evil Creator of this world - the demiurge; that some exceptional persons, the Gnostics, are able to unravel the deceptive nature of reality and offer gnosis - a kind of extra-rational experience. The way this trope Junctions is illustrated by examples of the writers such as L. Darell, F. Dick, and V. Pelevin; a rapper Oxymiron; the movies such as “The Matrix” or “The Truman Show”. The article offers an explanation of the popularity of the Gnostic trope. Current global trends and the spread of digital culture led to general uncertainty and disorientation, and people feel imprisoned in a sort of panopticon, as described by Michel Foucault. The Gnostic trope means an attempt to personalize this impersonal power by identifying it with the demiurge.