On the Need for Anthropological Study of the Organizational Dimension of Religion

Qualitative research on religion often overlooks its organizational aspect, even though most of religious life takes place within an organizational framework. Religious organizations are active on many levels: they educate and control religious specialists, shape religious materiality, and in many other ways influence how relationships with the sacred are conceptualized and lived out. The organization of religious life has implications that should be studied by researchers interested in lived religion, especially when they deal with such issues as religious experience, the integrative role of religion, ritual efficacy, and the transmission of practices and beliefs.

* Niniejszy artykuł powstał jako efekt rozważań będących wynikiem kilku projektów badawczych, w tym obecnie prowadzonego projektu badawczego NCN Opus 2019/33/B/HS3/02136.

The Reformation is described mostly as an upheaval. In fact, it is worth considering this period as transformation. The article is an attempt to modify the usual perception of this historical period. At the very beginning the paper discusses the idea of transformation from a sociological perspective. Then it introduces a comparison of the Reformation with other transitions and the late Middle Ages. This allows at the end to define the Reformation as a kind of consequence of medieval times and their transformation.

The roots of German nationalism among members of the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland are bound with the activity of German authorities who tried to separate the German community in the occupied Kingdom of Poland during the First World War. German nationalism of the era was based on religious, social, and political factors, such as the idea of a unified German nation both within and outside of the German Reich. According to this idea, the German state was to be the defender of the German people worldwide. Such ideas woke the separatist tendencies inside the Augsburg Church. The political situation in the Second Polish Republic and spread of the national socialist ideology in the 1930s increased the separatist tendencies in the Church and led to a conflict with its pro-governmental Consistory and the General Superintendent, later Bishop Juliusz Bursche.

The Oral and Written Traditions of the Qur’an and Its Place in Early Islam

The paper considers the form, status, and importance of the Qur’anic message in the first two centuries of Islam. The argument is that the term “Qur’an” could not have originally referred to the final body of revelation in a text form. Rather, the concept of the Qur’an must have functioned among the faithful as a term for oral transmission before the scripturalization of the revelation, and it is this oral function of the Qur’an that is primal to its literate function. It seems that just as in Judaism and Christianity, in Islam the process of remembering, passing on, collecting, and codifying the textus receptus, along with its stabilization and sacralization, was a centuries-long self-propelled operation shaped primarily by the oral tradition (especially in the presumed culture of illiterate people).

This article presents a case study of a Swedish-based NGO, Assyrians Without Borders (AWB), whose priority objective is to help Middle Eastern Christians, mainly Assyrians/Syriacs, in need in their homeland. The paper argues that Assyrians/Syriacs in Sweden have developed three forms of citizenship – religious, political and democratic. All three forms are transnational and have the potential to challenge the idea of national citizenship as being the dominant model of citizenship. Participating in AWB is understood as practising democratic citizenship, a concept seen as the Swedish ideal of model citizenship. The paper claims that AWB empowers its members and helps them to construct a mutually reinforcing dual Assyrian-Swedish identity.

Clergy (Kler, 2018) by Wojciech Smarzowski has aroused great controversy and many discussions about the position and role of the Catholic Church in contemporary Poland. I would like to look at the portraits of priests in the film in relation to the images previously created in Polish cinema. I am not going to analyze particular examples, but point to selected motifs and characters in order to interpret the images of clergymen and the church in their context. I will consider both the construction of individual characters and the image of the Catholic Church as an institution.