Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective
ISBN: 9781003264750
Platform/Publisher: Taylor & Francis / Routledge
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Humanities; History; Religion; European History; Islam - Religion; Judaism; Modern History 1750-1945; Christianity;

The book argues that religion is a system of significant meanings that have an impact on other systems and spheres of social life, including cultural memory.

The editors call for a postsecular turn in memory studies which would provide a more reflective and meaningful approach to the constant interplay between the religious and the secular. This opens up new perspectives on the intersection of memory and religion and helps memory scholars become more aware of the religious roots of the language they are using in their studies of memory. By drawing on examples from different parts of the world, the contributors to this volume explain how the interactions between the religious and the secular produce new memory forms and content in the heterogenous societies of the present-day world. These analyzed cases demonstrate that religion has a significant impact on cultural memory, family memory and the contemporary politics of history in secularized societies. At the same time, politics, grassroots movements and different secular agents and processes have so much influence on the formation of memory by religious actors that even religious, ecclesiastic and confessional memories are affected by the secular.

This volume is ideal for students and scholars of memory studies, religious studies and history.


Zuzanna Bogumił, PhD, works at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her published works include Gulag Memories: The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia's Repressive Past (2018) and a co-authored study titled Milieux de mémoire in Late Modernity: Local Communities, Religion, and Historical Politics (2019).

Yuliya Yurchuk, PhD, teaches history at Umeå University, Sweden. She specializes in memory, the history of religion and Eastern Europe. She is the author of the book Reordering of Meaningful Worlds: Memory of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Post-Soviet Ukraine (2014) .

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