Our colleague, Réka Marchut, will give a presentation in Cluj-Napoca on Thursday, October 10, 2024 at the international conference entitled Churches and Minorities, which is organized by the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities. The title of her presentation: The Catholic Church and the German Minority from Hungary in the Years of the WWII.

Tamás Gusztáv Filep will give a presentation at the conference entitled The Hungarian Martyrs of the Confessor Church III, organised by the Department of Historical Sciences of the Faculty of Reformed Theology of Selye János University on 9 October 2024. The title of his presentation is István Eglis' Way of the Cross. Dachau, 1944-1945 

Csilla Fedinec recalls the events in Ukraine in the HVG.hu series on regime changes in Central Europe

Our colleague Csilla Fedinec will give a plenary lecture entitled "A brief overview of Ukrainian legislation on national minorities, with special reference to Hungarian-Ukrainian diplomatic relations" at the international conference "Ukraine and the European Union: the development of relations in the light of the Russian-Ukrainian war, electoral processes and the rights of national minorities", which will take place on 4-5 October 2024 at the Uzhhorod National University, Ukraine.

A paper by Eszter Neumann was published in the Q1 journal Religion, State and Society. The article analyses the educational policy narratives of church policy makers, how they formulate strategies for Christian social mission and how they talk about the impact and role of churches in maintaining and reducing educational segregation.

You can read the open access article here.

Abstract

Since 2010, Hungary’s authoritarian populist government has radically redefined church-state relations, promoting the governance narrative of building an ‘old-style Christian democracy’. Public education has been reconceptualised within a religious framework and outsourced to religious actors. This article explores how key religious organisations engage with the government’s religious populism and govern their expanding school networks. Given the immanent tension between nativist Christian-conservative identity politics and Christian teachings about the church’s social mission, I focus on how Christian church elites have engaged with the education of underprivileged communities. Four characteristic types of strategic involvement are identified based on church education policies and their legitimacy discourses concerning their (lack of) engagement with the social question. Despite using different approaches to navigate political pressures, both the nativist illiberal and inclusive liberal visions of religion and their corresponding policies have reinforced the structures of segregated education and legitimised the government’s education policy.