The NLO publishing house is preparing to publish a translation of Daniel Scarborough’s historical study “ Russia’s Social Gospel. The Orthodox Pastoral Movement in Famine, War, and Revolution”. The author was a participant in the 2017 conference organized by our magazine within the framework of the RANEPA activities on the topic “Religion and the Russian Revolution”. On the eve of the book’s release, we publish in this issue of our journal “ Introduction”, which outlines both the methodological approaches of the author and the content of the study itself. Thus, we continue to cover topics related to the church history of Russia of various periods. In our opinion, this book sheds new light on the processes in the Russian church that preceded the historical breakdown of 1917. We hope that this publication will draw attention to D. Scarborough’s work both among specialists and among a wider audience interested in the historical aspects of Russian Orthodoxy.

The article analyzes the most significant texts of Russian right-wing publicists of the second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries concerning the Armenian-Gregorian Church. Conservative authors, starting with Mikhail Katkov, expressed dissatisfaction with the independent position of the Armenian Catholicos. In right-wing journalism at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Armenian-Gregorian Church was characterized as the basis of Armenian separatism. The most prominent exponent of this view was Vasily Velichko. Another author, Mikhail Menshikov, made sharp attacks against the Armenian church and people, but in 1912 he suddenly declared Russia’s duty to support the Armenians referring to Christian solidarity. The change in the position of Menshikov and some other moderate rightwing authors could, in the author’s opinion, be explained by trying to be in line with the government policy that gradually became more loyal towards the Armenians in the early 1910s.

The understanding that Peter I had created an original system of the Church administration which had differed from previous forms (now we usually call it the Synodal system) was not created iimediately. A certain historical distance and the introduction of critical historical analysis were needed to invent a concept. This article analyzes when and how this concept emerged, what were the terms the contemporaries used to shape it until 1917–1918, what were the semantic and stylisitc shades in elaborating the concept. The conditions for recognizing a new period in the history of Russian Church with its special administrative system appeared only by the middle of the 19th century. In historical and canon law researches, publicistic articles, policy briefs of authors of the second half of the 19th — early 20th century, speeches of the 1917–1918 Council of Russian Church’ and its preparatory bodies’ members many variants of naming of the current system of the Church administration were proposed. They had a temporal and qualitative dimension and the majority of them were judgmental. There was no single concept till the revolution. The searching of it did not only reflect the awakened historical consciousness but was also an expression of the ideological struggle in the field of the Church history.

The article draws a comparison of social identities of the two religious groups, the Molokan and Kryashen, by using the sources from the mid-nineteenth — early twentieth century. The sources include memoirs by the Molokan Nil Petrovich Dimryukov and the Kryashen Vasilii Timofeevich Timofeev. The article is based upon three theoretical concepts — “identity” by E. Erikson, “group formation” by R. Jenkins and “textual communities” by B. Stock. The author concludes that the tendency to construct communal life around authoritative religious texts among Molokans and Kryashens of the said time period had specific features: the tradition of textuality among Molokans faced challenges both from outside and inside the community, but also had its supporters; while the tradition of textuality among Kryashens was only gaining its special form. The author also notes the prospects of comparing the identity of both groups in the past with their present-day forms basing on his field research in Moscow and Kazan.

This paper aims to explore the mechanisms employed by the Muslim Brotherhood, within the framework of Islamic jurisprudence, to rationalize the presence of Muslims in Europe and to provide answers to the problems and issues they face. To achieve this, the article will concentrate on the perspectives of two prominent Islamic jurists from the Muslim Brotherhood milieu, Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Taha Jabir al- Alwani. They played crucial roles in addressing emerging questions surrounding the presence of Muslims in European societies, starting from the permissibility for Muslims to live in Europe to everyday issues and concerns. By examining the Muslim Brotherhood’s stance in the matter of Muslim presence and integration in Europe, the article seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the dynamic interplay between the Muslim Brotherhood and the socio-political landscape of Europe.

The article is devoted to an analysis of the religious factor in the American Revolution and the founding of the USA. Based on a wide range of sources and scholarly literature, the author shows a combination of secular and Protestant influences in the process of institutional formation of the American independent statehood. The author further reveals the significant role of polemical arguments and historical examples related to the Bible in the American political thought of this period. The majority of key actors of the American Revolution of the 18^th century were convinced that religion served as the basis for civic virtue necessary for a republican form of government. The worldview shared by the Founding Fathers implied a theistic source of law and legislative process. At the federal level, the separation of church and state established by the 1787 Constitution and the 1789 Bill of Rights was largely a consequence of the organizational fragmentation of American Protestantism. A conclusion is drawn about the dual nature of the US statehood at the end of the 18th century, which combined both secular and religious elements and was reflected in the symbolism of the Great State Seal (1782).

This article deals with the problem of the influence of dualistic religions over non-dualistic ones. The main point of the author is that each non-dualistic religion contains some difficult and complex characters who are venerated as guardian gods but who could be easily demonised under the influence of the dualistic worldviews. The reason for such demonisation is a relative simplicity of dualism that explains everything in the categories as ‘ Good’ and ‘ Evil’ that do not exist in non-dualistic religions. Therefore, as the author argues, dualistic religion always affects the non-dualistic one when they meet. The research takes the example of Turco-Mongol and Finno-Ugrian mythologies, and the author observes characters of such gods as Erlik and Keremet before and after they were affected by the Christian narrative.

The article analyzes aspects of the representation of religion in the paintings of Sargis Zakarian ( Vaspur), a representative of modern Iranian art. Born and raised in Iran, Zakarian was significantly influenced by Iranian culture, Islam, and the interconnection between religion and daily life, which is reflected in his works. As an Armenian Christian with a profound interest in Islam, he accurately identified phenomena distinct from traditional Armenian national and religious imagery, especially those related to the artistic expressions characteristic of Shia Muslims. Zakarian’s work from that period has not been extensively studied. Although not all of his works have survived, fortunately, some have been preserved and discovered.