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Volume 17, No. 1

Reflections on God’s Continent

Darrell Jackson

Philip Jenkins’ latest offering, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis, shines the spotlight on the presence of many Christians among those who have made their way to Europe from Africa, Asia, or Latin America, and from Eastern Europe to Western Europe. Some of these intentionally carry their Christian faith with them. Others have relocated for purposes of employment or education and have revitalized almost lost causes. Romanian migrants revived the ghost town of Aguaviva in Spain where over100 have settled, prompting the opening of a new Orthodox worshipping community. Aguaviva’s Romanian population is only a miniscule percentage of nearly two million Romanians, a tenth of the country’s population, who had already emigrated to Spain and Italy before Romania’s admission tithe European Union. In 2006 Romanians sent home more than ₤2 billion ($3.53 billion) in remittances to family members still living in Romania. In Bradford, England, an American branch of the Romanian Orthodox Church established a congregation in2005, and Roman Catholic parishes across the United Kingdom have been revitalized by migrant Roman Catholics from Poland. In March, 2007, Ross on Wye Baptist Church, in the heart of rural Herefordshire, England, commissioned a Ukrainian pastor to investigate the spiritual needs of the nearly 8,000 Ukrainian seasonal workers in the area. For an England vs. Russia football match, screened live at the church, there were just under 50 East Europeans from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Moldova, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Slovakia.

 These accounts of East Europeans living in Western Europe arise from recent research carried out by the Nova Research Center in England. They suggest, as does Jenkins, that Christianity in Europe, East and West, is increasingly characterized by transition and dynamism as a result of the movement of migrant people within and into Europe. Many more stories of faith being lived out in new surroundings remain to be told. F

Darrell Jackson is tutor in European Studies and director of Nova Research Center, Radcliffe College, Gloucester, England.

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Volume 17, No. 1

Catholicism and Islam: Failed Predictions of European Secularization

Mark R. Elliott

Page 14 • Winter 2009 • Vol. 17, No. 1 • East-West Church & Ministry Report

Catholicism

Philip Jenkins, professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, prompted extended discussion in 2002 with his highly acclaimed study, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). This study managed to provoke both enthusiastic affirmations and vehement disclaimers. See Franz Wijsen and Robert Schruter, eds., Global Christianity: Contested Claims(Amsterdam-New York: B. V. Rodopi, 2007). The Next Christendom contrasts the state of Christianity in the United States (for the most part, stagnant) and Europe (mostly in sharp decline) with the church in the global “South” – Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia – (remarkably dynamic). Jenkins successfully challenges the longstanding consensus of mainstream scholarship that secularization inevitably follows in the wake of modernization.

 As his study amply documents, lands south of the equator do not fit the secularization thesis. But Jenkins’ more recent work, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2007), makes a case for even European religious revitalization. In the process he marshals abundant evidence of religious vitality in Eastern Europe. As regards post-Soviet European states, Poland and the neighboring Czech Republic and Slovakia contradict the thesis of the inevitability of secularization.

• • Polish Catholic seminarians numbered 7,000  in 2005.
• • Polish monasteries and nunneries are thriving, home to 1,845 monks and 23,000 nuns.
• • Attendance in worship is strong with 78 percent of Poles reporting regular participation.

• • Poles migrating to Western Europe take their faith with them.
• • Britain now has a Polish population of750,000 to one million, with Poles now more numerous than Pakistanis.
• • “By some estimates, the greater London area has perhaps a million legal and illegal East Europeans” (God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis [Oxford University Press, 2007], 58).

• • More and more Polish priests are serving outside their homeland. Polish seminaries make “a special point of teaching them English which they will need to evangelize Britain or Ireland” (Ibid.).
• • Croatian Catholic churches are becoming more numerous in Britain, while 82 British Catholic churches now conduct masses in Polish. “We used to celebrate mass three time son a Sunday, and we were never full,” note done London congregant. “Now we have six or eight services every Sunday, and people are standing outside in the street” (Ibid.).
• • Poland’s popular Radio Maryja (Mary)distresses the Vatican and the Polish Catholic hierarchy with its ultra-conservative politics, its downplaying of the Holocaust, and its xenophobia. Nevertheless, it “demonstrates the survival of old-style reactionary church politics at least in corners of Europe”Ibid.,67).
• • South of Poland in the Czech Republic, Father Vladimir Mikulica has spearheaded a Pentecostal-style revival; and
• • Next door in Bratislava, Slovakia, SilvaKrcmery, a medical doctor and dedicated Catholic layman, has helped transform St.Martin’s Catholic Church into something resembling a North American mega church.

Islam

Jenkins also points out that Islam’s growing presence in Europe undermines the thesis of inevitable secularization. He dwells at considerable length on the promise and peril of growing Muslim minorities in various West European states. In addition, Jenkins highlights the longstanding place of Islam in the Balkans and its growing significance in Russia.

• • “Over seven million Muslims live in the Balkan states, with another 900,000 in Bulgaria” (Ibid.,114).
• • Albania is the only country in Europe with a Muslim majority; and
• • As a result of the Balkan Wars in the 1990s,Kosovo is more Muslim than ever, following the expulsion of some 40,000 Orthodox Christians. As for Russia:
• • Its 15 to 20 million Muslims account for 10 to14 percent of Russia’s total population of 143million.
• • Russia “has as many Muslims as the whole of Western Europe, and almost as many mosques –5,000 to 6,000” (Ibid.).
• • Russia’s Muslim birth rate is far higher than that of its non-Muslim population; and
• • The possibility of the spread of radical Islam is major concern of the Russian government.

 While Jenkins sees much of the religious revitalization of Europe in positive terms, he concludes with a disquieting parallel between Europe’s current religious strife and East-West ideological strife after World War II. His observations intriguing, but none-too-comforting: “It seems not only are rival ideologies once more locked in seemingly permanent struggle, but just as in the Cold War, Europe again represents a critical theater of rivalry – this time, among secularism (less triumphant than predicted), Islam (gaining ground),and Christianity (showing new signs of life). New specters are haunting Europe” (Ibid., 25). F

Mark R. Elliott is professor of history at Southern Wesleyan University, Central, South Carolina, and editor of the East-West Church & Ministry Report

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Volume 17, No. 1

The Attendants

Ruben Gallego

Editor’s note: Ruben Gallego was born in Moscow in 1968. His mother, a student, was the daughter of the general secretary of the Communist Party of Spain. Born with cerebral palsy, Gallego at age one was abandoned to the Soviet orphanage system by his grandfather, who told his daughter that her hospitalized son had died. Gallego miraculously survived a child-care regime that was described as “shocking [for its] level of cruelty and neglect” in a 1998 Human Rights Watch report (Abandoned to the State: Cruelty and Neglect in Russian Orphanages, http://www.hrw.org/reports98/russia2/). At age 15 he “graduated” from a children’s home to a retirement home where the severely disabled typically died for lack of care and food, frequently within a matter of weeks or months.

Against all odds, Gallego cheated death, escaped his institutional confinement, married, and fathered two children. Donated American technology came to his rescue in the form of a motorized wheelchair and a computer which he mastered with the use of his left index finger. In 2000 Gallego was reunited with his mother, with whom he now lives in Germany. Gallego’s largely  utobiographical White on Black won the Russian Booker Prize for best novel in 2003.

A Few Good Attendants

There were very few of them. Genuine nyanyas– caring attendants, full of kindness and concern. I don’t remember their names, or rather, I don’t remember the names of all the good-hearted ones. Among ourselves we divided them up into “evil” and “good.” For a long time I’ve tried – unsuccessfully– to shake the bad children’s-home habit of dividing all people into good and evil. The good attendants believed in God. All of them. There, I’ve gone and divided people up into categories again. I can’t seem to get away from it.

Believing Attendants

Believing in God was forbidden. They told us there was no God. Atheism was the norm. Nowadays hardly anyone would credit this, but that’s how it was. I don’t know whether any of the teachers were believers. They probably were. The teachers were forbidden to talk to us about that. Making the sign of the cross or dying an Easter egg could get a teacher fired, but not an attendant. An attendant’s wages were low, and there was a lot of work. There weren’t many people eager to wash floors and change children’s pants. The bosses simply turned a blind eye to the believing attendants. And they did believe. They believed no matter what. They prayed for a long time on night duty, lighting candle they’d brought along. They made the sign of the cross over us at night. At Easter they brought us dyed eggs and blini [pancakes]. It was forbidden to bring food into the children’s home, but what could the strict bosses do to these illiterate women?

An Attendant’s Story

There were just a few good attendants. I remember them all. Right now I’ll try to tell a story about one of them. This is a real story, told to me by an attendant. I’ll try to retell what my childish memory retained, as accurately as I can. “I’ve been working here a long time. When I arrived, I looked, and there were little children, some without feet, some without hands. And everyone was dirty. You wash one, then he crawls across the floor– and he’s dirty again. Some you have to spoon-feed, some you have to wash every hour. I was so tired. My first night shift I didn’t get a wink of sleep. They’d brought in a new one, and he kept calling for his mama all night long. I sat by his bed, took his hand, and stayed like that with him until morning. I cried and cried. In the morning I went to the priest to ask for his blessing to quit. ‘I can’t do it,’ I said, ‘I can’t watch this. I feel so sorry for everyone, it breaks my heart.’ But the priest wouldn’t give his blessing. He said, ‘This is your cross to the end of your days.’ I begged and pleaded with him. But then I worked for while and learned to live with it. “Still it’s hard. I write down the names of all the children I take care of on a piece of paper. I have a notebook at home, and that’s where I write all of you down. And at Easter alight a candle for each one of you. It’s getting to be alot of candles. It’s expensive. But still I light one and say an Our Father for each of you. Because the Lord told us to pray for all the innocent children. But you have such a strange name, Ruben. Must be Armenian.

 The Armenians are Christians, I know that for sure. Not Armenian, you say? Then I thought, since his parents don’t come to visit, they must be Baseman’s or something. A christened soul wouldn’t abandon her child. They’re bitches – forgive me, Lord, old fool that I am, no matter how hard you try, you still sin. But you’re going to be in my notebook without a last name recorded. Your last name is so queer, I wouldn’t Be able to write it. Everyone’s written down with alas name, except you. In prayer you’re only supposed to say the first name, but it’s still not good that there’s not a last name.”  

What can I add to this story? I grew up, read scads of different books, and now I think I’m very Smart. Thank you to my teachers, who taught me tread. Thank you to the Soviet state, which raised me. Thank you to the smart Americans, who created the computer and gave me a chance to type this text with my left index finger.

 Thank you to all the good-hearted attendants for teaching me about goodness, for the warmth in my heart that I carried through all my trials. Thank you for what can’t be expressed in words, or entered on a computer, or measured. Thank you for your love and Christian mercy, for the fact that I’m a Catholic, and for my little children. For everything. F

Excerpt from White on Black, copyright ©2004by Ruben Gallego, English translation copyright©2006 by Marian Schwartz, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. By permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

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Volume 17, No. 1

Collaboration Among Theological Librarians

Luba Zakharov

Theological Librarians’ Conference

Moscow, Russia, was the venue for a conference,30 April-3 May 2008, dealing with “Library Support for Educational Programs in Theological Schools. “Organizers, intent on fostering greater collaboration among theological librarians, included Alexander Popov, Head Librarian, Moscow Theological Seminary of Evangelical Christians-Baptists(www.moscowseminary.org); Katharina Penner, Head Librarian, International Baptist TheologicalSeminary, Prague (www.ibts.eu); and Dr. Sergei Sannikov, Director, Euro-Asian Accrediting Association (http://www.e-aaa.org/).

Participants and Purpose

Conference participants came from the Russian cities of Krasnodar, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Prochladny, and St. Petersburg; the Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv, Kremenchug, Kyiv, Odessa, and Zaporozhe; Chisinau, Moldova; and Minsk, Belarus. Others in attendance traveled from Prague, Rome, and from Holland, Michigan, and Durham, North Carolina, in the United States. Denominational affiliations included Baptist, Catholic, Christian Reformed, Orthodox, and Pentecostal.

 The purpose of the conference was to provide an opportunity for librarians from the former Soviet Union and from abroad to network, exchange ideas, and present new scholarship. A unique feature of the gathering was that not only librarians, but deans, rectors, faculty, and information professionals from universities, seminaries, Bible colleges, associations, and non-profit organizations were in attendance.  This diverse assemblage of educators gathered to collaborate on ways to strengthen theological training. St. Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute(http://www.standrews.ru) enriched the conference by making available for purchase its Russian translations of Western biblical and theological texts.

Workshops and Speakers

All who presented workshops stressed the value of the library to the theological enterprise and stated the importance of the mission of the library to the larger mission of their institutions. Katharina Penne opened the conference by emphasizing this point, encouraging participants to find ways to connect the mission of the library to the larger educational mission of parent institutions. She suggested that this shared vision should be the foundation for all decisions in collection development in support of theological education. Evgeni Borisovich Rashkowski, a guest from Moscow’s Library of Foreign Literature (www/libfl.org), addressed the issue of re-collecting religious materials that were destroyed after the Revolutions of 1917. His comments underscored the importance of the librarians’ role as stewards of the texts that carry the faith tradition.

 As both a faculty member and an administrator, Dr. Meri MacLeod, Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan (http://www.westernsem.edu/),explored the role of the library in distance education, encouraging librarians present to be pioneers in establishing good working relationships with faculty. Her presentation gave attendees an opportunity to consider long-term strategies for distance learning, not only through the purchase of necessary software, but also through the creation of a vision for this new means of delivering theological education. Librarian Tatyana Pavlenko, from Kharkov Medical University in Ukraine (www.ksmu.kharkov.us/), gave a thorough and detailed presentation on cataloguing, stressing the importance of comprehensive classification system capable of opening up to students the richness of the collection. Father Marek Rostkowski from the Pontifical Institute in Rome (www.urbe.it) introduced attendees to the library of the Pontifical Institute and its new open network. In addition, he discussed the Institute’s intention of working with the International Federation of Library Associations (www.ifla.org) to create a uniform international scheme of cataloguing rules.

 Dr. Victor Titarchuk represented ServanTek(http://servantek.org), a faith-based, non-profit organization, and Koha, its open source software. Dr. Titarchuk proposed that conference participants consider the integration of their library catalogs which could be accomplished with Koha software. Throughout the conference, he expressed interest in facilitating the creation of a library consortium for theological libraries in the former Soviet Union. Katharina Katharina Penne gave a second presentation at the conference on information literacy and the important function of librarians as educators. Particularly as technology changes the landscape of the library, the work of theological librarians will entail not only their personal navigation of new systems, but training faculty and students in their use.

 Luba Zakharov, reference and serials librarianat Duke University Divinity School Library, Durham, North Carolina (http://library.duke.edu/divinity/), gave a presentation exploring the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) and the kinds of technologies that are beginning to shape such catalogs in the United States. In addressing the growing impact of technology upon the library catalog, she described services such as Amazon.com and Google.com that are becoming embedded in the catalog, thus expanding its role as an inventory system to include its use as a new discovery tool. Although the role of the catalog as an inventory system will continue, it will be enhanced and reshaped to accommodate technologically savvy users and online digital repositories. Following a second session on distance learning by Dr. Meri MacLeod, Andrei Gorba chenko, also from ServanTek (http://servantek.org), gave an overview of Moodle and Greenstone2, open source software products that facilitate distance education.

 In her second presentation, Luba Zakharov spoke to the issue of “Managing Change in a Changing Technological Profession,” encouraging librarians to give further thought to their goals for their libraries leading to the development of more comprehensive library mission statements. In closing, Alexander Popov, head librarian at Moscow Theological Seminary, gave a presentation on “Creating a Library Website,” demonstrating the types of choices required in website development and explaining the value of websites to faculty and students.

Next Steps

The conference’s final open forum addressed possible next steps for the support of collaboration among librarians at a distance. Participants agreed 1) to formalize an association of Euro-Asian librarians (yet to be named); 2) to continue discussions on a newly formed listserv; and 3) to explore the possibility of a follow-up conference in Ukraine in 2009. All in all, the collaborative work begun at this conference established a community

of theological librarians whose underlying goal is to strengthen the work of theological schools in the

former Soviet Union. F

Editor’s note: Conference presentations are available in Russian athttp://www.moscowseminary.org.

Luba Zakharov is the reference and serial librarian, Duke University Divinity School Library, Durham, North Carolina (http://library.duke.edu/divinity/). Her blog is located at http://lubasmoscow.

blogspot.com/.