1883 Vienna in the Turkish Mirror

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 101-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Healy

In his 1883 playDie Türken vor Wien, Richard von Kralik, the Catholic writer and later doyen of Christian Socialism, recounts the story of the 1683 siege of Vienna. Habsburg military heroes, ordinary Viennese Bürger, and the Ottoman grand vizier Kara Mustafa appear on stage in Kralik's retelling of what had become a foundational moment in Austrian historiography. The defeat of the Turks at Vienna in 1683 has been hailed as Austria's finest hour, the Habsburgs' greatest service to Europe, and as the moment when Austria defended all of Western civilization from, among other things, the East, Asian barbarism, and Muslim infidels. Kralik may be the playwright here; but in a preface to the play, he introduces the two figures who are the true sources for his tale of 1683: Lady History and Lady Legend. They work together, each playing her part. Lady History and Lady Legend, he explains, sing in beautiful duet, “both accurate and truthful, neither lying nor inventing.” Kralik's juxtaposition of history and legend was astute. Any historian looking back to the events of 1683 and the stories that have since accumulated about Austria's “saving the occident” encounters a multi-century work in progress, a story under revision, a tale in which “legends” about coffee (said to be introduced to Europe by Turks fleeing Vienna) and croissants (a bun shaped, suspiciously, like a crescent) persist alongside themes more properly in the domain of “history”: class tensions, national conflict, and church-state relations.

2020 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 768-805
Author(s):  
Sergey V. Perevezentsev

The article examines Church-state relations in the history of Russia in the late 10th–17th centuries, i.e. from the moment of the initiation of the Russian Church to the end of the first Patriarchal period. The controversial character of the relations between the Russian secular and ecclesiastical authorities, the influence of various Church and political traditions on the real situation in Russian history is shown, as well as the process of Russian Church independence formation is studied, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the strengthening of state interference into Church life. The author comes to the conclusion that Russian secular rulers, Church hierarchs and spiritual and political thinkers were never afraid to creatively rethink traditions and canons depending on the actual external and internal circumstances.


Author(s):  
Eren Tasar

This introduction describes the main arguments and historiographical interventions undertaken in the present work. The majority of previous scholarship on Islam in Soviet Central Asia has treated the Communist anti-religious campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s as representative of the entire Soviet period. By contrast, this book argues that Stalin’s normalization of church-state relations in 1943–1944 allowed a permanent space for Islam to exist in Soviet society. This space rapidly became the site of an accommodation between Islam and Communism for many Central Asians. The introduction concludes with a discussion of the advantages and limitations of the sources employed throughout the book.


Author(s):  
Lauren V. Jarvis

Zionist churches proliferated in South Africa’s segregation era amid a global revival of the doctrine of divine healing. Among the nearly eight hundred new denominations that emerged were some of the largest Zionist churches, including Ignatius Lekganyane’s Zion Christian Church (ZCC) and Isaiah Shembe’s Nazaretha Church. All of these new denominations took root in the absence of government recognition and during a period when church-state relations were in flux. Many Zionists found ways to work around and in spite of segregation-era laws, but these efforts occasionally ended in disaster—as at Bulhoek in 1921. For scholars, Zionist churches have long posed problems of categorization. Scholars once imagined Zionists as embodying a distinctively African expression of faith, but important new scholarship has challenged this understanding. The time is ripe, however, to reassess what made Zionists different. This entry looks to Zionists’ doctrine and methods of evangelism to understand them as segregation-era rebels.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-75
Author(s):  
Fuk-tsang Ying

From March to December 2014, various Wenzhou churches were affected by the unprecedented destruction wrought during the initial execution of the cross-demolition campaign. Subsequently, this campaign extended from Wenzhou to cities like Ningbo, Taizhou, Lishui, and Hangzhou before returning to Wenzhou in July 2015. This article centers on Wenzhou, where authorities removed at least four hundred crosses from churches. It investigates whether the reasons offered for demolishing illegal buildings justify cross demolition, examines the role of the religious factor in the overall campaign, and determines whether the Zhejiang provincial leader attempted to tackle religion-related problems under the guise of demolishing illegal buildings. This article places the cross-demolition campaign in the context of church-state relations and analyzes it from a religio-political perspective.


1968 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 101-119
Author(s):  
Paul P. Bernard

That Austria's monolithic refusal to tolerate religious minorities within its borders in an age of increasingly general religious permissiveness would not for long outlive Empress Maria Theresa must have been apparent to all but the most obtuse contemporary observers. Throughout the period of his coregency (1765–1780), Joseph II had made it plain on more than one occasion that while, unlike Frederick the Great, he did not believe that all his subjects might attain their salvation in whatever way seemed best to them, he was, nevertheless, aware that many of them would persist in assuring their damnation in spite of the best efforts of Church and crown to save them. And he was unwilling to let the obduracy of a minority of his subjects cause the state to lose their wealth, their services, and their loyalty. Dominated by such radical ideas on the place of religious minorities in a state, Joseph, State Chancellor Prince Wenzel Kaunitz, and Franz Joseph Heinke, once Kaunitz's man but now independently charged with drawing up policy guidelines for a subsequent reorganization of Church-state relations, were as early as 1769 discussing not the advisability of tolerating non-Catholic religions but ways and means of implementing such toleration.


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