Old Religion, New Spirituality: Implications of Secularisation and Individualisation in Estonia

Abstract

chronically contested the territorial pattern of what we call Europe has been throughout its long history and how varied the cultures are that have found a sometimes precarious home on the Continent. Miri Freud-Kandel, for example, points out in her chapter on “Judaism and Europe” that, until the Second World War, Europe had been the primary home of Judaism for centuries and, despite all the expulsions and pogroms Jews suffered, the Continent’s history was intimately intertwined with Judaism’s development right up to the Enlightenment and beyond; today, after the Shoa and then the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, most Jews now live in Israel or the USA. ‘West’ and ‘East’, as applied to Europe, are revealed by this book as an oversimplified and contentious dichotomy. Migration and violently contested borders feature as a chronic element in European life rather than a recent ‘problem’. The complex intertwining and competition of religion and politics is a central ongoing fact of European life, even in the present era of increased secularisation at the level of many individual lives. Religion is still liable to be ‘weaponised’ or ‘misappropriated’ by rulers to prop up their power or by demagogues to boost their appeal to ethno-nationalism, notably in projects to ‘homogenise’ populations living in particular territories. The book makes one wonder again to what extent what we claim as ‘Western values’ are distinctively Christian in origin. How far does Europe’s religious heritage still invisibly shape aspects of Europe’s contemporary ‘secular’ culture? What aspects of that heritage are actually jettisoned by the growing numbers of the ‘non-religious’? How significant is their distinctive religious history for the contemporary politics of European societies? These questions and many others are raised and discussed in this Handbook even if they can seldom be definitively resolved. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe is an exemplary encyclopaedic project and will be an invaluable resource for historians, social scientists, theologians, and scholars of religious studies for some years to come, although, as editors of other encyclopaedias have found, updating is now easier in digital than in printed format. At a cost of over £100 most students will need to hope that this volume will be acquired by their institution’s library.