Theses/Dissertations - Church-State Studies
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Browsing Theses/Dissertations - Church-State Studies by Author "Berger, Peter L., 1929-"
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Item Messianic Jewish movement in Ukraine.(2011-12-19) Tonoyan, Lidiya S.; Berger, Peter L., 1929-; Church and State.; Baylor University. Institute of Church-State Studies.In the beginning of the 1990s, Ukraine, like many other post-Soviet states, was swept by the tsunami of global evangelism and religious euphoria. Because of a number of cultural and historical factors, Ukraine was transformed overnight, as it were, into a remarkably fertile land for a great variety of religious movements both homegrown and imported. While Orthodoxy in Ukraine draws the most attention in academia and media, evangelical Christian churches are often overlooked and remain woefully understudied. One branch of Christian evangelicals that has completely escaped scholarly scrutiny is the community of Messianic Jews, a community that has gained a significant presence in the Ukrainian religious landscape despite some significant challenges. The present paper is an attempt to comprehensively study and describe the Messianic Jewish movement for what it is and by doing so to contribute to the study of religion in Ukraine as a whole.Item Religion and the conflict over Nagorno Karabakh.(2012-08-08) Tonoyan, Artyom H.; Berger, Peter L., 1929-; Church and State.; Baylor University. Institute of Church-State Studies.The ArmenianāAzerbaijani conflict over Nagorno Karabakh has been one of the bloodiest and most intractable conflicts in the postāSoviet space. Although there have been a number of recently published important works regarding the conflict they have almost exclusively dealt with economic and political aspects of the conflict. Important as these factors are, the present study argues that by focusing exclusively on rational choice models conflict analysts and historians have unjustifiably neglected another important aspect of the conflict, namely its religious dimension. By drawing upon the historical experiences of the Armenians and Azerbaijanis, in which religion has played an important role in their respective identity formation, I propose that despite extensive arguments to the contrary religion was an important factor in the conflict as it served a complex set of sociological, political, and cultural roles. I further argue that although religion was an important factor, the conflict itself did not develop into a fully religious one. To accomplish the task at hand I reassess and reinterpret the available data utilizing a variety of intermeshing theories employing an interdisciplinary approach.