PROJECT: Confession as a way of constituting the community of the Orthodox Church
FUNDING: The project was supported by Saint Tikhon’s Orthodox University and The Active Tradition Foundation in 2024-2025.
DURATION OF THE PROJECT: 2024 – 2025
PROJECT COORDINATOR: Ivan Zabaev
RESEARCH TEAM: Svetlana Bankovskaya, Elena Prutskova, Valeriya Elagina, Anna Zueva
ABOUT THE PROJECT
In modern sociological research, the community is often understood as a sum of people involved in practices outside the service, such as social work, helping the needy or socialising after the service, etc. Thus, the community acquires the quality of an aggregate recognisable as a social institution through functions/practices directed outside the community itself. The phenomenal quality of the community (as a continuous process of production and reproduction of its integrity and at the same time preserving the specificity of the Orthodox community sui generis, its autopoiesis) remains unexplained. Whereas it is this direction of research attention to the details (micro-details) of community practice in vivo that can provide insight into the resources of its constitution, transformation, and sustainability. In this project, we start from the premise that liturgical activity turns out to be constitutive in relation to religious community. On the one hand, this is what constitutes it as a religious community (as opposed to various NGOs and/or clubs and interest groups, which are capable of carrying out various social activities and organising mutual assistance of their members to each other). On the other hand, by focusing on liturgical activity, we emphasise its social component. That is, we are trying to pass between the Scylla of the mystical understanding of community (or rather, pointing to the mystical unknowability of Christian solidarity) and the Charybdis of the reduction of the temple community to extra-devotional activity. The community, thus, receives a “two-dimensional image”: on the one hand we observe its functioning on the external contour – as a social institution conjugated with other social (not religious) institutions, and on the other hand, we turn to a detailed (micro-logical) consideration of its inner life, to the very process of its production and reproduction, to its internal resources that ensure its stability in time and specific organisation in space. It should be borne in mind that this study of internal resources and details does not mean subjectification or psychologisation of this approach, i.e. addressing the inner life of the parishioners themselves: we are interested in the life of the community as the organisation of community practices in specific details of space and time; the parishioners themselves are only one of the components of these practices.
