Tag Archives: Serbia

Patriarch with Two Homelands

by Slavica Jakelić | български | ქართული | Ελληνικά | Română | Русский | Српски

Building of the Patriarchate, Belgrade

On February 18th, the Serbian Orthodox Church elected its new patriarch—59-year old Porfirije Perić. The new Archbishop of Peć, Metropolitan of Belgrade and Karlovac and Patriarch of Serbia, is a theologian who served for a year as the bishop of the Serbian army, represented the Serbian religious communities in his country’s Broadcasting Agency Council, and spent the last six years as the Metropolitan of Zagreb and Ljubljana.

Even before he was elected, those familiar with the Orthodox Christian world pointed to the difficult work awaiting the new Serbian patriarch. As Andreja Bogdanovski wrote on this blog, the patriarch will have to face the demands for the autocephalous status of the Macedonian Orthodox and Montenegrin Orthodox churches. While these requests are not new—in the Macedonian case, they are more than half a century old—that long history does not make them any less pressing. To address them, Porfirije will have to navigate the institutional and theological disputes along with profound political and territorial issues that still shape the life of the region.

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Must Orthodoxy Be a Barrier to Liberal Democracy? The Case of Serbia 1903-1914

by Boris Begović  |  ελληνικά  |  ру́сский  |  српски

It is obvious that the fall of communism made the Orthodox face issues regarding democratic secularism. By secularism, I mean not the decline-of-religion meaning, which has been completely discredited, but secularism understood as pluralism, according to Aristotle Papanikolaou, as he defined it recently at his keynote lecture, “A Christian Secularism,” at the conference, “Religion in Public Life,” held annually in Trebinje, Herzegovina. Noting that an attempt was made in some of the Orthodox countries to reinstate a kind of symphonia model, whose origin could be traced back to the Byzantine period, he points out that, due to the various occupations—Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, communist—there was virtually never an opportunity to address the issue.

Nonetheless, there were a few exceptions; one is a nation-building process of Serbia, in the late 19th and early 20th century. With slow but sustainable devolution from the Ottoman Empire, ending in the 1861 de facto independence and the 1878 de jure independence, the Kingdom of Serbia, without a doubt an Orthodox country, experienced profound dilemmas in the nation-building process, development of institutions, and organizing society. The magnitude of the dilemmas increased because the Serbian national liberation and independence political project was indigenous, without any European or other sponsor nation. Continue Reading…

Evolution and Science Curriculum Debates in Serbia

by Gayle Woloschak and Tatjana Paunesku  |  ελληνικά   |  ру́сский

Recently in Serbia “a group of interested citizens” with signatures from more than 50 academicians and 100 additional people with postgraduate degrees (including 5 clergyman) released a petition to “revise the curriculum for study of evolution.” This petition was circulated to Serbian universities, as well as to several government bodies responsible for education including Ministry of education, science and technological development. In essence, this petition requested that theory of evolution be taught as “just a theory,” and (more or less) literal reading of Genesis be taught alongside it in science classrooms in Serbia. This problem is not new to Serbia; a similar effort was initiated in 2004 by the former Minister of education, but this was put on hold and thus efforts have been renewed to modify the school science curricula again.

What is remarkable in this discussion is the response from a group of orthodox theologians, teaching at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology at the Belgrade University. (For a version of this document in Serbian, please see here; for an English version, see here.) A group of 11 faculty members released an official statement explaining why this petition is inappropriate and even anti-Orthodox. Continue Reading…