EDUCATIONAL MISSION OF PARISHES ABROAD AS EXEMPLARY CENTRES OF PRESERVATION OF LIVE HERITAGE OF EASTERN ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN CHURCH VALUES
EDUCATIONAL MISSION OF PARISHES ABROAD AS EXEMPLARY CENTRES OF PRESERVATION OF LIVE HERITAGE OF EASTERN ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN CHURCH VALUES

Author(s): Velina Toneva
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Education
Published by: Editura Eikon
Keywords: Local Church Heritage; Parochial Schooling; Sunday Schools; Emigrant Subcultures; Religious Education
Summary/Abstract: Sunday schools of émigré communities around the world are units of cultural identity: language, history, and culture. Focused on sustaining a subcultural lifestyle in a set of educational, commemorative, and festive initiatives, those organisations had attracted the attention of historians and anthropologists. Considered to preserve live heritage in risk more actively than original practices at their country of origin, not only because émigré parishes did not suffer through atheism, those cultural units in such extraordinary conditions meet even more urgent educational demands. Religious education in local churches balanced between cultural responsibilities of state and church, in migration is even more valued and practiced, as parish life that represents ethnic and national community. This paper is based on my recent direct observations and pilot personal participations in educational activities of Bulgarian parishes abroad, compared to émigré parishes of other churches and to what researchers had found in their studies through the years and nowadays.

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