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Police claim to have destroyed more than 100 tons of marijuana in the past two years.
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Police claim to have destroyed more than 100 tons of marijuana in the past two years.
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Despite oil price slump and currency crisis, Baku says there’s no ‘urgent’ need to borrow from international lenders.
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Two other party members face charges of intimidating a witness at the trial of accused mob boss Naser Kelmendi.
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It is ranked 69th out of 168 countries probed by anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI), who have designated it the most crooked in Europe.
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Genuine dialogue is based on the hypostatic principle of the being, either divine or human. When I meets You in a hypostatic relation, there is always the eternal You which confirms that the dialogue is genuine, becoming hypostatically clear. The existentialist concept will be examined in the light of the hypostatical principle or that of the person, given by Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov. Father Sophrony considers that his relationship with St. Silouan the Athonite and the experience of the personal God are the most important things that influenced his way of life and his theology. In a dialogical sense, it is most necessary to highlight the genuine dialogue between Father Sophrony and St. Silouan, both having tasted the same experience of the eternal You, of the personal God. They lived the time of a true challenge to the very existence of mankind and have experienced that nothing but personal prayer could save mankind from chaos and total destruction. This challenge encouraged theological and philosophical thinkers of the last century to focus on the rediscovery of humanism in the context of personal approach.
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Peter Singer is a philosopher and an ethicist whose works are widely published, being no less controversial. His ideas of animal liberation and biomedical ethics occupy an outstanding position both in philosophical literature and in the media. His views on infanticide do not enjoy in the media a notoriety comparable, for example, to that of his position on the issue of voluntary euthanasia, but constitutes a serious challenge posed to “traditional” morals. His belief that babies with handicaps have no right to life and, in certain circumstances, may be painlessly killed, are in opposition to traditional moral principles regarding children, considered powerless beings who need to be protected and treated with respect, whether disabled or not. This study raises Peter Singer’s ethical theory, with the analysis of his views on infanticide.
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The text is a theological commentary with patristic and spiritual argument, of the verse 11 of Psalm 50. The Prophet David, therefore, asks from God to build for him a pure heart in order to show that as no one can build other than God, so the heart can be made clean by no other than him. By „pure heart” and „right spirit” the prophet David wants to unchain from the reality of sin that prevents him from seeing the good that God loves, and he wants a new life where the light of the knowledge of God waters his soul thirsty for it.
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Ninety years ago, the propaganda apparatus of the still young „Soviet power” launched a signal meant to radicalize the fight against religion. The opportunity for this was the Congress of militant atheists (S’ezd Voinstvuiuscih bezbojnikov), deliberately and viciously scheduled for the first day of the Passover of 1925. Once the ideology of the militant atheism was launched, it will have a longlasting career in Soviet Russia and the satellite countries, overlapping the period with the worst religious constraints and persecutions of the modern era. The so-called „militant atheism” showed its true colors from its first moment of existence, as an extremist and exterminating one: it was not enough that religion had to be „fought against”, it also had to be rendered non-existent.
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This article evokes the 70s in Romania, a period of moving from the time when the censorship of the state power went easy, allowing some cultural freedoms and an almost normal social and religious life – which the intellectuals call „the thaw” of the communist Romania – to Ceaușescu`s short „cultural revolution” inspired by one of his trips to Asia, by the ideological actions done by China and its satellites. Coming home after visiting these countries, Ceaușescu imediately called, on july 5 1971, for a working conference of the department of ideology and political and cultural educational activities resulting in a list of stipulations that suggested an appalling return to the 50s. Due to the strong opposition of the intellectuals, mostly writers, our culture and literature were not returned to the 50`, as Ceaușescu was hoping. After the initial ephemeral outrage to the cultural mini revolution of Romania, the West quickly forgot this episode. Ceaușescu`s attempted cultural revolution is one of his few failures, the result being a long conflict of mutual wearing with the artists and the intellectuals. The population of the country did not experience the cultural mini revolution, nor, even less, sensed it as a begining of the end.
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Assuming the task to present St. Calinic of Cernica as seen by the poet Valeriu Anania, the author justifies his metapoetic approach through the need to provide the contemporary Romanian society with historical landmarks and patterns of life and action, among which those of its saints. In this regard, he first briefly evokes the current and traditional cult of St. Calinic, a monk and bishop in the XX century, to whose canonization - in 1955, in full communist regime (!) – the theologian writer Valeriu Anania had his contribution, by exhuming the relics and placing them in the reliquary. From this „unutterable” experience and with the above motivation, Valeriu Anania, in Aiud prison, will begin, in his mind, to compose the acathist named „The enlightener”, dedicated to St. Calinic, along with another one named, „The enlightened” dedicated to St. John the Wallachian, martyred in the XVII century by the Turks for refusing to move to the Muslim faith - both texts being included in the volume. „Acathist pages” (1976). The present project has three basic sequences, entitled „Acathist pages” by Valeriu Anania - „a unique intertwining between political and religious poetry”, the poem dedicated to St. Calinic - „The enlightener”, - a necessary comparison, and the theme of an anagogical portrait „in motion” - by adding to previous interpretations of literary critics such as Liviu Petrescu and Lucian Vasile Bâgiu, his own perspectives and additions, emphasizing the literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical meanings of the (religious) text as well as a minimum inventory of poetic forms and modalities for characterization of a „saint among men,” „totally perfect” as it was and remains St. Calinic of Cernica.
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The text presents the concept of the saturated phenomenon as it appears in the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion, while stressing the importance it has in the description of Christian religious experience. If in saturated phenomenon, intuition overflows the concept, meaning that man receives more than he bring himself by his intellectual capacities, then Christian revelation, the Theophany and mystical experience can be adequately described using this paradigm, rather than by modern paradigm of subject and object. Man receives himself from the phenomenon that is excessively donated to him, transforming himself, from knowing subject, to a gifted one, and experience, in its Kantian meaning, is replaced by a counter-experience. Describing the events more adequately, saturated phenomenon finds its place alongside the other (poor and neutral) phenomena which can describe only objects and becomes the most appropriate way of speaking, phenomenologically, about Christ’s revelation in history.
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Alexandru Mironescu, in his study Limits of the scientific knowledge presents the wrong ideas largely promoted by the scientists of the last century. Some of these scholars were honorable enough to admit that the studies started from insufficiently verified hypothesis which led them to disastrous conclusions. In his study, Alexandru Mironescu also mentions the medical hypothesis of Alexis Carrel, whom he considers the most balanced scholar of the last century.
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This review provides a synthetic introductory study of a wider ethno-folkloric and theological research under development. This paper exhaustively treats the subject of the heavenly powers from the popular perspective, based on the main ethnological and folkloric collections and with the Orthodox dogmatic canon as landmark. It also includes conclusions of the field surveys conducted by the author. In addition, one of the purposes of this essay is to bring the new theoretical and methodological perspective of researching popular religiosity, respectively religious concepts of vernacular and vernacular religion into the theological field.
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Pr. lect. univ. dr. OVIDIU PANAITE, Teologia politică în timpul dinastiei constantiniene. Criterii privind relația Biserică-Stat pentru o societate pluralistă, Editura Reîntregirea, Alba-Iulia, 2014, 535 p.
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This study of Ovidiu Moceanu is part of a broader research on dream issues, published in 2012 in the volume Treatise on dream. The author examines the metamorphosis of a literary theme whose implications in European literature are seen today in some experiences regarding the possibilities brought by dreams of manipulating the characters consciousness, of constructing the literary discourse. Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, with his Life is a Dream, launched a formula which echoes throughout Europe. There are analyzed examples from the works of European romantics, whose experiences gave rise to the popular novels of the era of post-romantics, as well as some modern literary directions and trends focusing on the dream.
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Nietzsche’s diagnosis of “death of God” influences contemporary philosophical atheism. He is countered by Jean-Luc Marion with arguments that draws from the apophatic tradition of the Church for which the true God can not be reduced to a rational concept, without being turned into an idol. Trying to deny God, atheism always operates with a well defined concept, and this strictness is the strongest counterargument against it. This text presents the apologetic arguments that the French phenomenologist made against Nietzschean nihilism, against contemporary atheism which feeds from it and against the idol that takes the place of the living God. Marion demonstrates that through the “death of God” an idol of the divine dies, therefore it is the very “death of God” that dies.
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The author investigates a part of Mircea Eliade’s work in the light of the experience of an opposition couple (and its manifestation in the language of symbols, rituals etc.) which he called cosmic religiosity (in Eliade’s own words) and apophatic experience. This thematic binomial does not exist as such in Eliade’s analysis, but its presence is tacitly detectable everywhere. The two ways of relating to reality is the main tension that secretly hunted Eliade all his lifetime. If the great phenomenologist and historian of religions had recognized it as such, his existential path would have probably been different. The author proposes a rewriting of Eliade’s Treaty on history of religions, of the transcendental anthropology in Sacred and Profane, as well as a fundamental criterion for a discerning judgement of other religious traditions.
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The present study is a theo-political analisis of the way in which the secular power and ecclesiastical authority interacted in the Western Middle Ages. Starting from the hermeneutical differences of opinion between post-nicean Fathers and the gelasian concept of demarcation between the two spheres, it highlights the paradigmatic changes occurred with Renovatio Imperii of the Carolingian and then ottonian era. It also shows how the static vision on the relationship between sacerdotium and imperium is radically altered by hegemonic pretensions either of the German Emperors, or the papacy, both powers being tempted by a structural monopoly on the entire Christian community.
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The article evokes a bohemian character of the last century, the translator Tașcu Gheorghiu who, besides the surrealist poems of his youth, had not written or published his own literature. He was a strange and unique person, highly respected in the literary sphere. He was a prodigious translator, who used to work painstakingly, also admired by many young poets and writers who were aware of his bizarre lifestyle and schedule. Renowned for knowing by heart Craii de Curtea-Veche he had the schedule of Pașadia, meaning that he never went out of his house earlier than 7 pm. Just as the characters of Mateiu I. Caragiale secluded themselves in the past, Tașcu Gheorghiu used to seclude in literature, where he was at ease.
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The interview captures some aspects related to the Church life under the communist regime, the collaboration with the Romanian Security organs, the secular-humanist current who challenges today legitimacy of faith, the issue of religion in schools, the problems with the Burning Bush movement as well as others regarding different personalities of the Church.
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