Publications

"In this article, we discuss religious supply in Russia. Evaluations of religious supply are based on the empirical study “50 Confessions”, conducted by the Sociology of Religion Research Laboratory in the fall of 2015. Consideration of religious supply provides us with new insights into explaining religious processes in contemporary Russia. Particularly, it suggests an alternative to the secularization theory explanation of the gap between religious affiliation (70% of respondents call themselves Orthodox Christians) and religious practice (3% of respondents receive communion regularly) for Russian Orthodox Christians. In this Article the religious supply model, developed on the basis of religious market theory (see the works of R. Stark, R. Finke, W. Bainbridge, L. Iannacone, and others), is briefly described. Then this model is applied to the evaluation of Russian religious supply, with the variable being the number of priests in Russia. For the estimation of our model’s parameters, empirical data from the “50 Confessions” study is used. The model allows us to evaluate religious supply limitations, and this challenges general assumptions on the secularized nature of religious processes in Russia."

"In the philosophy of Arendt and Levinas, one’s attention is drawn to the parallelism in the way they put forward the “concealment” / “interiority”, correlated with the “economy” that was originally understood, as opposed to the space where the meeting with the other(s) occurs. Similarity, however, ends where they specify what lies beyond the “economic” and who this other is. If for Arendt, existence outside the «economy» is one of the activity, for Levinas the true face-to-face relation is fundamentally different from any action. Key words: intersubjectivity, public sphere, economy, Arendt, Levinas."

"The article examines the relationship between religiosity and basic values in Russia. Basic values are measured by the Schwartz's Portrait Value Questionnaire. The analysis is based on the data of the European Social Survey conducted in 2012 and the Orthodox Monitor survey conducted in 2012 as well, which is a representative survey of churched Russian Orthodox Christians. Usually based on the results of mass surveys, the connection of basic values with religiosity in Russia is very weak. One possible reason is the use of inappopriate indicators to measure the degree of religiosity. One of the most important characteristics that distinguish churched Orthodox Christians is regular Communion, which presupposes quite serious preparation, fasting and Confession. People make an attempt to rethink their views, values, and change their behavior. If this happens with a certain regularity, then it can lead to a gradual change in basic values, conditioned by religiosity. Such working out the best of oneself may not occur if a person just attends religious services, but does not receive Communion. Churched Orthodox are much more committed to the values of Conservation and Self-Transcendence, and less to the values of Openness to change and Self-Enhancement. One of the unexpected results was the discovery of significant differences in the values of Universalism, in which the churched Orthodox Christians are noticeably ahead of the average Russians, while in most previous studies the relationship of religiosity to the values of Universalism was either negative or absent, and only rarely was weak positive. Also, despite the general low commitment to the values of Openness to change, the differences are due to the great rejection of the values of Hedonism and Stimulation, while the values of Self Direction differ from the average Russians only slightly."

"There are many approaches to religiosity measurement in sociology of religion, but most of the methodological literature is devoted only to the first step of operationalization of this concept — defining the aspects of religiosity and choosing the indicators for each of these aspects. At the same time almost no attention is paid to the inverse operation — the construction of the generalized measure of religiosity based on the operationalization developed. We consider three basic approaches to this problem and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. The first approach is using individual indicators. It allows minimizing the loss of information about the respondent’s answers, but it lacks generalizability and doesn’t allow for comparison of religiosity effects if religiosity is measured with different indicators. The second approach is construction of a generalized measure of religiosity on the basis of several indicators using summation, averaging, the principles of the strongest or the weakest response, and Factor Analysis. An advantage of this approach is that it produces a religiosity scale of at least ordinal measurement level. But one of the problems that emerge when we try to apply Factor Analysis is that it implies a measurement model with reflective (effect) indicators while the theory rather favors the formative measurement model. The principle of the strongest response overestimates the number of highly religious people while the opposite — the principle of weakest response — underestimates it. The third approach is the construction of a typology on the basis of several indicators with relatively homogeneous religiosity groups using Cluster Analysis or Latent Class Analysis. The advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t imply unidimensionality of religiosity phenomena and tries to find types that actually exist in the data. We come to the conclusion that in current situation, characterized by the plurality of social forms of religiosity, it would be most productive to use the latter approach. Further, we develop a typology of Russian Orthodox Christians based on the data of the Orthodox Monitor survey (2011) using Hierarchical Cluster Analysis. The typology is based on four indicators: believing in God, frequency of Church attendance, frequency of attendance at religious services, and frequency of Confession and Communion."