Freedom, Compassion and Creativity

The goal of the research analyze and characterize the role of Ukrainian show business during the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity, highlighting the forms of participation of artists in these events, their influence on social processes and the transformation of the artistic environment in the context of these historical events. The research uses a comprehensive approach, which includes historical analysis, content analysis of media materials, as well as a comparative analysis of the participation of artists in both revolutions. The study offers a comprehensive comparative study of the role of show business in two key revolutionary events in Ukraine, revealing the evolution of forms of civic activity of artists and their influence on the formation of national consciousness and political culture in Ukraine. The work shows that Ukrainian show business played a significant role in both revolutions, but with certain differences. During the Orange Revolution, the participation of artists was more spontaneous and emotional, while in the Revolution of Dignity it took on a more organized and strategic nature. In both cases, show business became a powerful tool for mobilizing society and forming national unity. The analysis demonstrates how artists used their popularity to spread the ideas of democracy and European integration. Special attention is paid to the influence of these events on the creativity of artists and the development of Ukrainian popular culture. The study also highlights the role of social media in enhancing the influence of artists during the Revolution of Dignity, highlighting how participation in the revolutionary events affected the subsequent civic position of artists and their role in shaping public discourse in Ukraine. Key words: Ukrainian show business, Orange Revolution, Revolution of Dignity, Ukrainian popular culture, transformation of the artistic environment.

The article examines three novels about the Revolution of Dignity, written by men and published in 2015: “Fiery Winter” by Andriy Kokotyukha, “Maidan Semester” by Kyryl Halushko, “2014” by Vladyslav Ivchenko. Among other works on this subject, they are already partially characterized by critics and scholars. This article focuses on the mythologized geo-image of the Maidan, which is a source of metaphorical meanings and ultimately reveals itself in the archetypes of Chaos / Harmony / Order and Own / Stranger. This study is one of the stages in the study of the strategy of forming collective memory in Ukrainian novels about Euromaidan and was partially tested in the form of a report at the conference. The key results were achieved through a combination of the concept of artistic understanding of the myth by Northrop Fry and aspects of artistic myth-making by Elena Bondareva, which made it possible to identify the main areas of study of the key for all three plots geo-image. The place of the Maidan topos in the structure of the plots is traced, in particular its first appearance. It is concluded that the authors rely on the positive mythology present in the mind of the reader, developing its semantics in accordance with the attitude of the characters to the events of the Revolution of Dignity. The potential of binary oppositions is traced in this. It is established that a larger number and variety of characters allow the author to develop the metaphorical semantics of the Maidan mythology (V. Ivchenko), while the limited system of characters (A. Kokotyukha) preserves the semantic potential of the Maidan topos, reduces it to retransmission of already formed families. K. Halushko takes a different approach, allowing his character to change his views as a result of participating in revolutionary events. Further analysis showed that the undeveloped metaphorization of the Maidan topos does not allow A. Kokotyukha to engage in appropriate archetypes to deepen the semantics of the work as a whole. Instead, the other two authors, despite their different ways of constructing the plot, succeeded. As a result, an assumption was made about the further artistic understanding of the theme of the Revolution of Dignity and the potential of the relevant artistic strategies. The proposed approach requires further testing on a larger array of works.

The rapid recognition of the contributions of theology in public spaces in Africa is a positive development. It is understood that theology can only be impactful if it engages public issues in their context. However, the understanding of the public in public theology is blurry because its precise meaning remains debatable. The construct ‘publics’ is hugely influenced by Western conception, where human interaction spaces are categorized into separate sects of social spaces. This conception arguably derives from the Western individualistic operative ideology. The question is whether the notion of public theology can be extended to include African public praxis to contribute to effective engagement with public issues in Africa. This article explores and broadens the concept of public theology by incorporating African public praxis. It investigates how public theology, traditionally understood within a Western context, can be expanded to include African societies’ distinct and diverse practices, experiences, and contexts. First, this article comprehensively analyzes the meaning of ‘public’ in public theology, focusing on unique, distinctive African perspectives and experiences. Second, the article elucidates the multifaceted dimensions of public theology as it intersects with African social, political, and cultural realities. Thirdly, the article offers fresh insights into the transformative potential of theological reflections within African public praxis. The article presents a discussion on the importance of understanding what public theology is in an African context. Understanding public theology in Africa will contribute to its effectiveness. It enriches the discourse on the role of public theology in addressing challenges that Africans face.

3–5 sentences, or around 120 words and no more than 200 words Although globalisation and pluralisation have challenged the traditional identification of Christianity as a European religion, the Christian faith will continue to play a role as a source of meaning and identity marker for many in Eastern and Southern Europe. Although levels of practice and religiosity certainly do and will continue to vary, the long history of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy have left indelible marks on culture and society. The search for meaning and identity construction are particularly strong in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, where citizens disenchanted with anti-religious totalitarianism seek a more satisfactory alternative. Inter-religious relations with the growing Muslim population and political debates over issues of bioethics and human sexuality will require great sensitivity and discernment from Christian leaders. Intra-Christian diversity is also likely to increase via migration. As lay Christians seek new, meaningful forms of personal spirituality, it is likely their witness that will prove decisive in the vitality of Christianity in this region in the decades to come.

The current state of development of the non-state sector of Ukraine and Poland, which emerged from the same geopolitical space, and therefore has many common features and characteristics, is studied. At the same time, it is emphasized that civil society in Poland historically developed at an accelerated pace. This helped her to avoid the accumulation of errors and problems during the implementation of democratic transit. It emphasizes the important role of civil society as an important component that ensures the social balance and unity of the Ukrainian nation in interaction with the European community, which is especially actualized in the conditions of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The challenges faced by the civil sector of Ukraine and Poland in confronting the armed aggression of the Russian Federation on Ukrainian territory, as well as the destabilizing factors associated with it, are more broadly explored. The importance of ensuring the sustainable development of the civil sector for the realization of the strategic goals of Ukraine - European and Euro-Atlantic integration, which is the choice of the Ukrainian people, confirmed by the Orange Revolution, the Revolution of Dignity and enshrined in the Constitution of Ukraine, is substantiated. It has been established that the effective functioning of civil society requires a strong foundation of the legal environment, which helps the civil sector to realize its political-social and people-power potential. The importance of maintaining a balance between achieving state security and eliminating bureaucratic obstacles in the activities of public organizations has been proven. The importance of preserving the unity and ideological closeness of Ukraine and Poland in order to increase their socio-economic potential was emphasized. Due to similar geostrategic challenges, it is important to strengthen cooperation between the two states, especially in defense, information, economic, energy, humanitarian and other spheres. The main threats to the security of Ukraine and Poland, consisting in the aggressive revanchist dangerous ideology of the Russian Federation - racism, which pushes the Russians to try to restore political influence on the countries of Eastern and Central Europe and create the USSR 2.0, are substantiated. It is especially important to jointly fight against hybrid threats from the Russian Federation and its satellites, which consist of destructive actions aimed at weakening the already established political and socio-humanitarian ties between Ukraine and Poland.

"... lucid and stimulating... " -The New York Times Book Review"Essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the new Eastern Europe and the collapse of Soviet control over it-informative and incisive." -Zbigniew Brzezinski"Gati’s book... is the most current and best-informed study of this rapidly changing world.... Professor Gati is uniquely qualified to understand and give perspective to the impact of perestroika and Soviet ‘new thinking’ on the events in Eastern Europe." -William H. Luers, Former U. S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia"... a superb synthesis of the postwar evolution of Soviet-East European relations and the first up-to-date analysis of the revolutionary events in that part of the world in 1989." -Michael Mandelbaum, Council on Foreign Relations"An up-to-date and lucid overview of the troubled course of Soviet-East European relations at time of momentous change in the Soviet bloc." -Sarah M. Terry"... excellent analysis and synthesis... " -Foreign Affairs"this book is written in a lively style and is a good scholarly synthesis of the post-Second World War evolution of Soviet-East European relations ending in the revolutionary events of 1989." -Canadian Journal of Political Science"... a lively and perceptive account... " -Military Review"Clearly and simply written, this book is particularly useful as a compact introduction to the prehistory and transformation of East European politics." -Choice"It is well organized, readable, and sensitive to complexity; find the time to read it." -History

This collection of contributions addresses the theme of religiously motivated and religiously framed civic activism by bringing together anthropology and theology. The main goal is to put forward a concept of religious activism as local, non-elitist responses challenging dominant discourses and regulation of the religious in authoritarian and more democratic societies. Highlighting complex entanglements of religion, civic engagement, and political participation over the last decade, the authors explore the ways faith-based claims, acts, and initiatives from below are evolving in public spaces, mostly in post-Soviet societies. The contributors to this collection shed light on a variety of faith-based claims arising around religious materiality, governance questions, and unequal access to resources in Russia, Georgia, Eastern Germany, and in the USA. The contributions also identify the means of mediating acts of religious activism, those chosen forms of public expression that make the voices of religious activists more visible and mobilise individual and collective actions in public spaces.

To mark the 35th anniversary of the revolutionary events of 1989, the twentieth anniversary of the European Union’s 2004 enlargement, and the tenth anniversary of Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, East European Politics and Societies has invited six members of the journal’s editorial and advisory boards to contribute reflections on problems associated with the anniversaries. This introduction sets the contributions in context, and it asks how the period as a whole—now nearly as long as the period of Communist rule in most of the region—should be conceptualized. It argues for the explanatory value of defining the era not so much in terms of “post-Communism,” but in terms of the revolutionary experience that in 1989 provided the yardstick against which subsequent developments have been measured.

Securitization of cyberspace is of great geopolitical concern. Behaviour on the Internet is not diminishing the influence of existing borders but can polarize society along territorial divisions. The paper explores territorial differences in the subscription to public pages and open groups in social networking sites (SNS), which emerged as a reaction to revolutionary events in Ukraine (known as Euromaidan or Revolution of Dignity) in 2013–2014 and Russia-backed armed conflict in the East of the country. The findings show differences in subscription to such pages in Vkontakte (the most popular SNS in Ukraine before a ban in 2017) among citizens of Ukraine and Russia, regional centres in Ukraine, cities in uncontrolled by Ukrainian government territories, reclaimed by Ukrainian army territories, territories of Lugansk and Donetsk regions which were not under substantial control of Russia-backed separatists, and peripherial cities of the neighbouring Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhya oblasts. The paper also analyzes the geopolitical narratives of pro-Russian public pages in Vkontakte and shows how SNS could be used as a geopolitical tool.

Increasingly, it appears that 1989 marked an epochal turn in world politics, comparable to 1815, 1848, 1918 and 1945. The revolutionary events in Eastern Europe were the culmination of a process of change that had its roots in economic and military developments during the precding decade in turn, the events of 1989 have set in motion forces that will significantly alter the international system. This book analyzes the changes and discusses what we can expect the major factors in the new international order to be. Highlighted are the political and economic crises in the Soviet Union, the critical role of high technology in national and multinational economic power, and the likelihood the the Third World will be the locus of violence and instability.

In this article I investigate ritual life at the Moscow Choral Synagogue, the largest and longest running Orthodox synagogue in the Russian capital. Unlike many Eastern European synagogues, this synagogue is a thriving prayer community due to its unique congregation of Russian, Georgian, Bukharan, Mountain, and visiting Western Jews. I focus on a fistfight that took place between an Israeli and a Georgian Jew during prayer. I detail how Russian and Georgian Jews interpreted the incident to be a result of their different ethnicities, Russian and Georgian respectively. The fight elucidates how ritual in post-Soviet society provides the means for the production of ethnicity and Jewish identity. Arguing for localism within Judaism's transnational ideology, I suggest that Jewish identity, like ritual, is performative and contextual. I also show how the shifting power relations in post-Soviet society have reshaped ethnicity, making state-endorsed market reform a reference point of ethnic differentiation.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the coverage of the issue of finding geopolitical partners and allies of Ukraine in the geopolitical teachings of Ukrainian thinkers of the first half of the 20th century. The problems of determining foreign policy priorities and Ukraine’s participation in international alliances in recent decades, the search for reliable partners, foremost in the security sphere, are outlined. It is emphasized that the Revolution of Dignity and Russian aggression crystallized the geopolitical priorities of Ukraine – the course for European and Euro-Atlantic integration was returned to the country’s Constitution, and the Russian geopolitical threat became a fact of the collective consciousness of Ukrainian society. It is noted that the theoretical work of Ukrainian political theorists of the first half of the 20th century has not lost its relevance in our time. Furthermore, it is noted that in the interwar period, the Black Sea region was the geographical space that aroused the greatest interest of Ukrainian geopoliticians and which they considered decisive for the future of the Ukrainian state. In their opinion, the fact that Ukraine is historically a part of the Black Sea-Mediterranean communication space, and also ensured the trade relations of this region with the Baltic States, determines the area of search for partners and allies. However, not only countries located in the region are among Ukraine’s potential allies, but also states that have significant geopolitical and economic interests there. The attitude of theorists of Ukrainian geopolitics to the idea of the Baltic-Pontic Federation and the list of countries that can join it is analyzed. The Ukrainian thinkers’ understanding of the peculiarities of the attitude towards the idea of the union of the countries of Eastern Europe and the creation of the Ukrainian national state within its ethnographic boundaries of the main geopolitical subjects of Europe – Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Soviet Russia – is revealed. The significance of the interaction of the Ukrainian state with Poland and Romania is emphasized. It is emphasized that the ideas of Ukrainian geopoliticians of the first half of the 20th century have not lost their relevance and require further study and understanding.

Introduction. In the article is analyzed the perception of the Ukrainian politics of memory by contemporary Russian humanities. The focus is on how Russian researchers today assess the memory space of Ukraine as a whole and what preconditions determine their vision of its latest transformations. The events of 2014 in Ukraine (Revolution of Dignity, occupation of Crimea and parts of Donbass by Russia) changed radically the relations between the states in the Eastern European region and intensified their memorial practices with renewed vigor. The beginning of the war with Russia almost completely stopped the Ukrainian-Russian scientific dialogue (that was not very dynamic), in humanitarian issues. Purpose. The main goal of the research is historiographical analysis, first of all, of Russian humanities scholars studies about the processes in Ukrainian politics of memory (and historical politics), which were published in the “post-Maidan” period, from 2014 until now. Results. The lack of scientific dialogue between Ukrainian and Russian scientists leads to a complete lack of discourse about the problem, so this investigation is the first attempt to delineate it. The main methodological difficulty is overcoming the “political uproar” that is constantly raging around this topic. However, it is impossible to overcome entirely such “information noise” because it overwhelms most of the “humanitarian” texts of Russian researchers. The “scientific vocabulary” of their works, the authors’ complete misunderstanding of the essence and specifics of historical and ethnological terminology are particularly striking. The analyzed scientific literature is very heterogeneous in stylistic direction. In most cases, the Russian humanities views everything, that relates to Ukrainian memorial practices exclusively in a negative light. There is a Russian historiographical tradition of disrespect and neglect of the Ukrainian national narrative, ignorance of Ukrainian history, which affects on its simplified and superficial analysis of modern Ukrainian memory policy. Conclusion. In general, Ukrainian historical policy as a phenomenon and historiographical precedent occupies a prominent place in modern Russian humanities. The thematic direction of the Russian scholars research in the field of Ukrainian memory policy and its assessments are marked by ideological, schematic and extremely negative conclusions.

This paper analyses the public theology of Pentecostalism in the Chinese context of Hong Kong by discussing Pentecostal Christians’ public involvement. It asks whether Pentecostal Christians actively shape society or are rather shaped by the surrounding culture and absorb and reflect dominant trends within a culture. The essay explains the different aspects of a Pentecostal public theology in the Chinese context by first giving an overview of different historical forms of Pentecostalism in the Hong Kong and Chinese context, each of them expressing a different pattern of public expression and engagement with public issues. The essay then presents some cases of how Pentecostalism engaged in public issues in Hong Kong. A third part identifies motifs of Pentecostalism that are particularly prominent in the Chinese cultural context. The article suggests that these cultural elements shape the engagement with public spheres and push Pentecostals in the Chinese context towards a public theology that is similar to that of conservative Evangelicals.

In the first five centuries of the common era, the kiss was a distinctive and near-ubiquitous marker of Christianity. Although Christians did not invent the kiss-Jewish and pagan literature is filled with references to kisses between lovers, family members, and individuals in relationships of power and subordination-Christians kissed one another in highly specific settings and in ways that set them off from the non-Christian population. Christians kissed each other during prayer, Eucharist, baptism, and ordination and in connection with greeting, funerals, monastic vows, and martyrdom. As Michael Philip Penn shows in Kissing Christians, this ritual kiss played a key role in defining group membership and strengthening the social bond between the communal body and its individual members. Kissing Christians presents the first comprehensive study of the ritual kiss and how controversies surrounding it became part of larger debates regarding the internal structure of Christian communities and their relations with outsiders. Penn traces how Christian writers exalted those who kissed only fellow Christians, proclaimed that Jews did not have a kiss, prohibited exchanging the kiss with potential heretics, privileged the confessor's kiss, prohibited Christian men and women from kissing each other, and forbade laity from kissing clergy. Kissing Christians also investigates connections between kissing and group cohesion, kissing practices and purity concerns, and how Christian leaders used the motif of the kiss of Judas to examine theological notions of loyalty, unity, forgiveness, hierarchy, and subversion. Exploring connections between bodies, power, and performance, Kissing Christians bridges the gap between cultural and liturgical approaches to antiquity. It breaks significant new ground in its application of literary and sociological theory to liturgical history and will have a profound impact on these fields.