This study analyses several aspects of the relationship between communist censorship and literature, from the vantage point of literary sociology. Focusing on the issue of religious drama, the author intends to examine the transformations undergone by Romanian literature in the 1950s and 1960s, considering the impact of totalitarian communist ideology had upon it. What the study highlights is the game between prohibition and subversiveness, between misappropriation and reappropriation, which shaped the literary climate of that period. One of the conclusions (...) envisaged here is that despite unrelenting and excessive pressures exerted by censorship, literature resisted being turned into an ally of the Romanian Communist Party. (shrink)

The link between language and thought formed a major new exploration of twentieth-century philosophy. Languages nuance our ideas and perceptions. Though from various angles, Heidegger, Derrida, Wittgenstein forged new ways of understanding the relationship between our views of the external world and our culturally and linguistically pre-determined modes of expression. Another giant in this field of exploration is the Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica (1909-1987), who has so far remained generally unknown to the Western World because of the Iron Curtain. (...) The Romanian Sentiment of Being (Sentimentul românesc al ființei), first published in Romanian in 1978, is a philosophical work at the intersection of metaphysics and philosophy of language. The title of this book may be deceptive. "Romanian" does not mean ethnically circumscribed; it does not limit ontology to nationality but rather reflects on how language can carry ontological thought. The Romanian Sentiment of Being invites the readers to meditate on the fundamental theme of being and how it is expressed in a culture in time. This being in time marks the tension between moment and eternity, captured in the fairytale "Ageless Youth and Deathless Life" ("Tinerețe fără batrânețe și viață fără de moarte"), which Noica interprets in detail. The translation of the story will be found in the appendix. Noica also analyzes one of the most famous poems in Romanian, Mihai Eminescu's "The Evening Star" ("Luceafărul"), and readers will find its translation in the appendix. (shrink)

The article reflects on the nature of the political in theatre, assessing the notion that theatre is the last free public space and evaluating the claims to be political of rival, problematic modes of writing—the theatre of fact or verbatim theatre and the allegorical late plays of Bond, Pinter and Churchill, turning to consider the problematic legacy of Brecht, the avatar of the political. The discussion turns to writers often excluded from the political nomenclature, developing the notion of the centrality (...) of critique and offering an argument for the Naturalist writers as propagators of true ‘thinking aloud’, thereby suggesting they provide a model for theatre as such. The piece concludes with a discussion of the author’s own contribution to the genre in the light of these analyses. (shrink)

To discuss what was the attitude of the Romanian society towards the increasing economic, social and political role of the Jews throughout history is one of the aims of this paper. Serban Papacostea, the outstanding specialist in mediaeval history, makes use of the syntagm “hostile tolerance”, which specified the general attitude towards the Jews of the Orthodox mediaeval world of Byzantine origin. Tolerance - defined the unlimited opportunity for Jews to be accepted, settle, move and act freely within the (...) Romanian principalities, all the way to the status of possessing properties in Moldavia and Wallachia. There were, however, mixed feelings of hostility manifest at three distinct levels: mental, juridical and political. As for the mentalities, both popular and high brow education as well as prejudices held the Jews guilty for the death of Christ. Even if physically the Jewish presence in Romania has become symbolical, the history of the Jews, the traditions of the Jewish culture and spirituality, the imprint of the Jewish contribution on the emergence and development of the Romanian society will remain the perennial values of a historiography aspiring to fulfill its duty, forever preserved in the conscience of generations to come. (shrink)

This book presents a collection of studies by Romanian philosophers, addressing foundational issues currently debated in contemporary philosophy of science. It offers a historical survey of the tradition of scientific philosophy in Romania. It examines some problems in the foundations of logic, mathematics, linguistics, the natural and social sciences. Among the more specific topics, it discusses scientific explanation, models, and mechanisms, as well as memory, artifacts, and rules of research. The book is useful to those interested in the philosophy (...) of real science, but also to those interested in Romanian philosophy. (shrink)

The present study represents a preliminary theoretical attempt to analyse the socio-political influence and impact of the Romanian Orthodoxy within the Romanian public life and political culture since 1990, both through the relation between the Orthodox Church and the state, and its impact on the wider society. An open-ended reflection on a constantly unfolding reality, the approach focuses on demonstrating the profound “modernity”—not backwardness—of Orthodoxy’s implicit political theology and derived ideologies and their “modern” destructiveness. The pivotal segment of (...) the study is the relation between modernity and a theory of exclusion derived from a rather unorthodox (brief) interpretation of its emergence from the main carriers of modernity, namely Enlightenment and humanism. Instead of conclusion, the final section compiles and comments a few reformist initiatives and some possible philosophical-theological ways out of the deadlock of ideological self-centrism that still dominates our Orthodoxy. (shrink)

This article presents the development of elementary schools supported by the Orthodox Church in Transylvania between 1868 and 1921. Until 1918, Transylvania belonged to Hungary. In 1918, it was united with the Kingdom of Romania. As Hungary was a particularly complex state in ethnic and confessional terms before 1918, the school system developed under the coordination and financing of the churches. The government intended to gradually replace them with schools run by communities or state. It was not until the end (...) of the 19th century that radical measures were taken. The situation was fully resolved just after the unification of Transylvania with Romania when Romanian Orthodox denominational schools were nationalised and transformed into state schools. Contribution: Although summary works on the history of education in Romania or various research on the history of schools at the local level have appeared in Romanian, the impact of governmental and legislative decisions in Hungary on Orthodox confessional education in Transylvania has not been analysed. In German, the historian Joachim von Puttkamer has dealt with this perspective but especially concerning the schools in the Slovak areas of Greater Hungary. This PhD thesis of the author, P Brusanowski, was the first approach in this direction regarding the Romanians in Transylvania. The article presents for the first time in English a short analysis of the relationship of the Orthodox Church authorities in Transylvania to the educational policy decisions of the central authorities in Budapest. The parallel use of the reports of the Ministry of Education to the Hungarian Parliament, and the reports of the school councils of the executive body of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Transylvania to the ecclesiastical legislative forum, is an important part of this article. (shrink)

This article presents the development of elementary schools supported by the Orthodox Church in Transylvania between 1868 and 1921. Until 1918, Transylvania belonged to Hungary. In 1918, it was united with the Kingdom of Romania. As Hungary was a particularly complex state in ethnic and confessional terms before 1918, the school system developed under the coordination and financing of the churches. The government intended to gradually replace them with schools run by communities or state. It was not until the end (...) of the 19th century that radical measures were taken. The situation was fully resolved just after the unification of Transylvania with Romania when Romanian Orthodox denominational schools were nationalised and transformed into state schools.Contribution: Although summary works on the history of education in Romania or various research on the history of schools at the local level have appeared in Romanian, the impact of governmental and legislative decisions in Hungary on Orthodox confessional education in Transylvania has not been analysed. In German, the historian Joachim von Puttkamer has dealt with this perspective but especially concerning the schools in the Slovak areas of Greater Hungary. This PhD thesis of the author, P Brusanowski, was the first approach in this direction regarding the Romanians in Transylvania. The article presents for the first time in English a short analysis of the relationship of the Orthodox Church authorities in Transylvania to the educational policy decisions of the central authorities in Budapest. The parallel use of the reports of the Ministry of Education to the Hungarian Parliament, and the reports of the school councils of the executive body of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Transylvania to the ecclesiastical legislative forum, is an important part of this article. (shrink)

The study discusses the paradox of the failure of the Romanian Church United with Rome, Greek-Catholic (RCUR) to assert itself after 1990, in the context of a revival of the life of all other religious communities. The significant decrease in the number of Greek-Catholic believers and the difficulties in exercising their rights are germane to the limits of democracy in Romania. No other vulnerable communities, neither immigrants, gays, Roma,nor Jehovah's Witnesses, have been denied, all this time, the protection of (...) the Romanian state, as Greek-Catholics have been. The systematic denial of the rights of the Romanian Church United with Rome (Greek-Catholic) is explained by the feature which distinguishes RCUR faithful from the members of other vulnerable communities: their organisation is perceived by the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC) as an adversary. The Romanian Orthodox Church constantly proclaimed the illegitimacy of the RCUR in the first half of the twentieth century, and participated in its dissolution when the opportunity arose in 1948. It holds today the same explicit goal. The societal circumstances, specific to anarchic democracy, allow a major player like the ROC to impose its policy of undermining the RCUR. In accordance with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith's concept, the material and symbolic competition between the RCUR and the ROC is interpreted as an example of "bad behavior as good politics". The ROC strategy finds an optimal framework for maximizing gain in the circumstances of the Romanian anarchic democracy. (shrink)

The European emigration on the other side of the Atlantic was a complex phenomenon. The areas inhabited by Romanians got acquainted to this phenomenon towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Therefore, starting with the year 1895, a certain mixture of causes led to a massive migration to America, especially of the Romanians from the rural areas. The purpose of our study is to explore the causes of the Romanian emigration across the ocean (...) up to the First World War to present the Romanian emigrants' features (occupation, age, gender, social status, religious affiliation, the way they were distributed across the North-American territory) and to bring forth essential aspects of the way they embraced the assimilation process. From a methodological standpoint our analyses are based upon official data of the US Census. This data is being interpreted in the light of some reference papers referring to the period that makes the object of our study. A certain amount of information presented here relies on our research activity in the Metropolitan Archives of Sibiu, where the ecclesiastic correspondence of that time provides very interesting data.  . (shrink)

Drawing on the existent literature in the field and on in-depth interviews, we aim to examine here the practice and the meaning of wearing hijab by Romanian-born Muslim women. In our attempt to show the particularities of veiling among young Romanian-born Muslim women, we take into account the social and cultural context, the meanings and the values that these women convey to wearing the hijab and the consequences that such a practice has for their lives in the community (...) and in the Romanian society at large. We hope that the findings presented and discussed in this paper will enrich the research on this topic and will add a new perspective on the status of Muslim women in Eastern Europe. (shrink)

This paper deals with the Romanian experience as a developer of projects and investor of resources in the countries of the Global South during the 1970s. It follows the country’s grand narrative in its Communist Party’s documents, as compared to that of the statements of the international meetings of the commu­nist parties in the 1960s and 1970s and to that present in the party’s newspaper Scinteia, and in contrast to documents of the political executive committee of the Romanian (...) Communist Party collected from the Romanian National Archives and the Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives. The purpose of this research is to analyse the Romanian solidarity messages in the party discourse, their degree of compliance with the solidarity messages of the rest of the countries in the socialist camp, actual actions of humanitarian assistance in the countries of the Global South, and how those actions and messages were filtered and transmitted to the Romanian readers of print press. The results indicate a discrepancy between public discourse and archival discourse on the one hand, and the nature of information disclosed to the public, on the other. (shrink)

Higginbotham argued that certain linguistic items of English, when used in indirect discourse, necessarily trigger first-personal interpretations. They are: the emphatic reflexive pronoun and the controlled understood subject, represented as PRO. PRO is special, in this respect, due to its imposing obligatory control effects between the main clause and its subordinates ). Folescu & Higginbotham, in addition, argued that in Romanian, a language whose grammar doesn’t assign a prominent role to PRO, de se triggers are correlated with the subjunctive (...) mood of certain verbs. That paper, however, didn’t account for the grammatical diversity of the reports that display immunity to error through misidentification in Romanian: some of these reports are expressed by using de se triggers; others are not. Their IEM, moreover, is not systematically lexically controlled by the verbs, via their theta-roles; it is, rather, determined by the meaning of the verbs in question. Given the data from Romanian, I will argue, the phenomenon of IEM cannot be fully explained starting either from the syntactical or the lexical structure of a language. (shrink)

The Romanian Journal of Society and Politics Corruption and Development,volume 2, number 1, May 2002.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Romanian Cultural and Political IdentityDonald R. KelleyThe Journal of the History of Ideas, in collaboration with other institutions, including the Universities of Bucharest and Budapest and the Soros Foundation, recently sponsored the second in a series of international conferences being planned on topics in current intellectual history. (The first, “Interrogating Tradition,” was held at Rutgers University, 13–16 November 1997.) The Romanian conference, which was held in the (...) Elisabeta Palace in Bucharest (27–31 May 1998), was devoted to “Culture and the Politics of National Identity in Modern Romania.” Over forty scholars, mainly from Romania but some also from the U.S., France, Germany, and Hungary, gathered to discuss a variety of questions about Romanian society, past, present, and speculative future; and they were joined by at least as many visitors, especially students, from the local area and beyond.Topics discussed included politics, language, economics, historiography, religion, education, philosophy, ideologies, intelligentsia, particular intellectuals, minorities, and women (though not Gypsies or gays). Under this riot of rubrics a wide range of questions were posed in interdisciplinary fashion, with frequent, sometimes impassioned interventions. What is—was, might have been, can be—Romania? Who is a Romanian (and who not)? What is Romania’s relation to the West and the East? (And what are the “West” and the “East”?) To modernity, to modernism, to modernization? What is—has been, should be—the function of intellectuals, of political and cultural elites, in understanding the Romanian past and in setting a course for the future? What, more generally, is the role of history in answering such questions? Or is history perhaps (as Karl Krause remarked of psychoanalysis) the disease for which it claims to be the cure?Keith Hitchens’s keynote address suggested that rehashing old essentialist debates might not be productive at millennium’s end, but the conference itself could not avoid some excursions down the paths of memory and myth. For historians, Western historians anyway, Romania seems to have too many pasts. Located at the juncture of four previous empires, Romania is a mosaic, or perhaps a pandemonium, of ethnic, religious, economic, and ideological groups that can only imagine, or invent, a nationality. Geographically (and in many ways culturally) remote from the West, Romania for a long time (as Sorin Antohi remarked) lacked both a public sphere and a civil society; and suffering “a Counter-Reformation without a Reformation” (Alexandru Dutu’s phrase), it has not enjoyed a tradition of religious or ethnic toleration. Nor have either the Germans or the Jews (as Glass said) found their own unity within the changing borders of the modern Romanian state. Not until the nineteenth century did Romania develop, out of its Boyar background (as Siupiur argued), an intellectual elite that could create a modern national history and help turn “peasants into Romanians” (Antohi’s phrase); and even then this elite seemed more attracted to conservative [End Page 735] (Herder, Savigny, Burke) than to liberal views of autochthonism. Many features of Western modernity, such as Newtonian science, reached Romania late, and indeed there was a retrograde movement against liberalism under the aegis by orthodox religion. In any case this intelligentsia has been as fragmented and multiform as the Romanian past itself. True, some Romanian scholars like to posit a mainstream tradition, “excesses aside,” as one speaker put it—but how, asked another, can historians put “excesses” aside from the devastating perspective of this century?Political and cultural self-examination was the dominant theme of this conference. Nationality, said Pippidi, depends on three factors, viz., name, language, religion, and territory. The Romanian name dates from the tenth century, indicating a separation of the Roman from the Greek tradition in Wallachia; and from the seventeenth century the idea of a mainly Roman provenance was given privilege. As a language, “Romanian” was spoken in the late Middle Ages, but the first written document is dated 1521. The principal religion in Romania was and is Greek orthodox, although there are also Roman Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, and German Protestant communities, as well as the Uniate church created in the eighteenth century. As for the territory, this has been a matter of change, conflict, and confusion throughout the tragic course... (shrink)

(2000). The Romanian utopia: The role of the intelligentsia in the communist implementation of a new human paradigm. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 3, The Philosophy of Utopia, pp. 107-115.

The comparative study of Romanian and Hungarian Neopagan organizations with an ethnocentric or "Ethno-pagan" ideology is an exploratory research aimed at mapping the similarities and the differences between these religious minorities, with a highlight on their level of institutionalization, their core values and degree of political mobilization. Zalmoxian groups and organizations promote the revival of Romanian spirituality through a process of reconnection to its ancient, supposedly Dacian and Thracian roots; by the same token, Hungarian Shamanist movements are aimed (...) at recovering a supposedly lost spirituality, built-in into the deepest layers of Hungarian language and cultural practices. A web rhetoric analysis of these organizations is carried out in order to assess audience involvement, communication style and the use of multimedia tools to convey their messages. (shrink)

The vacuum is the lowest energy state of a field in a certain region of space. This definition implies that no particles can be present in the vacuum state. In classical physics, the only features of vacuum are those of its geometry. For example, in the general theory of relativity the geometry is a dynamical structure that guides the motion of matter, and, in turn, it is bent and curved by the presence of matter. Other than this, the classical vacuum (...) is a structure void of any physical properties, since classically properties are strictly associated with physical objects such as particles and finite-amplitude fields. The situation is very different in quantum physics. As I will show in this paper, the difference stems from the fact that in quantum physics the properties are not strictly tied to objects. We know for example that physical properties come into existence - as values of observables - only when the object is measured. Thus, quantum physics allows us to detach properties from objects. This has consequences: one does not need pre-existing real objects to create actual properties, and indeed under certain perturbations the quantum vacuum produces observable effects such as energy shifts and creation of particles. An open question is if by necessity the vacuum comes with an embedded geometry, and if it is possible to construct viable physical theories in which geometry is detached from the vacuum. (shrink)

In the last decades, scientific developments are largely discussed and debated mainly at the media level. Based on the agenda setting model, the importance of a certain theme is given by the frequency of its appearances in mass-media. Within this context, this paper focuses on the issue of stem cells and its media coverage in Romania. Using content analysis of the most read national newspapers, the research aims to emphasize two relevant aspects: the stem cells issue is only partly visible (...) in the written media and the debate between ethics and science is rather non-existent. (shrink)

Besides Dracula, Ceauşescu, and Nadia Comăneci, monasteries constitute a permanent Romanian brand, inextricably linked in every foreign visitor's mind to Romanianness. Specific to Moldavia and Bucovina—the Eastern and Northern parts of Romania—these monasteries have attracted visitors for the past 500 years. The person visiting a sacred site is transformed from being merely a tourist into a pilgrim. The painting “The Ladder towards Heaven” at the Pângăraţi Monastery, for example, highlights the importance of the mental and physical involvement of the (...) tourist-pilgrim as an interactive participant in the process of self-discovery. (shrink)

Over the past 20 years, along with official endeavors directed towards the accession of Romania into the European structures, political parties tried to integrate themselves into wider European families. Approaching the European People’s Party (the most prominent group in the European Parliament) - dominated by Christian democrats whose existence was largely influenced by the Catholic social teaching - seemed to be one of the most difficult tasks. For their first European elections held in 2007 several Romanian political parties - (...) apart from the National Christian Democrat Peasant Party (a member of the European Christian Democratic Union since 1987) - changed their orientation and claimed themselves as Christian Democratic. This article intends to explore the extent to which Romanian political parties who assert themselves as Christian-democratic can be considered to belong to this political family or whether their claim has a rather administrative motivation. (shrink)

In string theory with S-dualities, there is an object-oriented realism and a structure-oriented realism. This paper discusses the advantages of “string structural realism”, a form of the latter, having a multi-aspected structure with a “model-oriented” pluralistic ontology, and grounded in the relation among fundamental objects of various string models.

Illocutionary Force and Romanian Orthodox Sermons: An Application of Speech Act Theory to Some Romanian Orthodox Sermons The aim of the paper is to analyze religious discourse with the use of the instruments of semantics and pragmatics. Essentially, it sets out to identify the linguistic elements which enable the illocutionary force in the Romanian orthodox sermons, especially in the discourse of some important figures which have influenced and still influence the Romanian orthodox theology and the religious (...) life in Romania: Father Cleopa, Father Nicolae Steinhardt, and, nowadays, Father Teofil Pârâianu. It is usually assumed that a sermon implies, on the one hand, a kerugmatik action, that of annunciation, and, on the other hand, a translating action of the biblical induce the human will to practice the words in order to Christian precepts. Mutatis mutandis, the perlocutionary effect depends on the illocutionary act and of the illocutionary force. In theory, the illocutionary force of an utterance is strictly motivated by the pragmatic. But there are linguistic elements which function as efficient markers of the illocutionary force, for example performative verbs, verbal moods and some adverbs. The criteria proposed by Searle in order to differentiate the illocutionary acts resulted in the identification of several types inside this class. Searle's taxonomy serves the research purposes: the identification of illocutionary acts found in this kind of religious discourse and, finally, outlining a pattern of manifestation of the illocutionary force inside the sermon. (shrink)

Lucian Blaga was an early- and mid-20th century European philosopher whose work was suppressed at the height of his career by the ascension to power of the Romanian Communist Party and the creation of the Romanian Socialist Republic. Because of historical circumstances, Blaga's philosophy has not become known outside of his own country, although within Romania it continues to be read and discussed. Were it to become known outside of Romania, Blaga's philosophy might well be able to contribute (...) to contemporary philosophical discussions. ;The thesis of this dissertation is that Blaga's philosophy has contemporary relevance to Anglo-American philosophy. Two steps are necessary to support this thesis. First, Blaga's philosophical system must be explained in sufficient detail to enable the reader to see how it can be applied to a variety of philosophical issues. This will be accomplished in six sub-chapters introducing Blaga's life and work, his philosophy of philosophy, his metaphysical system, his epistemology, his philosophy of culture, and his philosophy of religion. ;Secondly, Blaga's philosophy must be applied to issues discussed in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy in order to show how it can contribute to contemporary discussions. It seems likely that Blaga's philosophy has contemporary relevance to a number of philosophical fields. The field to which it will be applied in this dissertation is philosophy of religion, an arena of contemporary philosophy that is the scene of much lively debate. This section contains eight sub-chapters attempting to apply Blaga's philosophical insights to issues in this field. They are, in order, the nature of philosophy of religion, the problem of religious language, the question of religious knowledge, the justification of religious belief, the existence and nature of God, religion and science, the problem of inter-religious communication, and the "problem" of religious diversity. ;The dissertation concludes that Blaga's philosophy can make relevant contributions to issues in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of religion, and by extension, that it therefore has continuing relevance to Anglo-American philosophy. (shrink)

In the extensive literature on the semantics of noun phrases, the most commonly encountered paramters of classification concern the semantic type of their denotation, the distinction between familiarity and novelty, meant primarily to differentiate definites from indefinites, the strong/weak distinction, or that between quantificational and non−quantificational noun phrases, as well as, most recently, that between choice−functional and non−choice−functional DPs (Reinhart 1997, Kratzer 1998, Matthewson 1999).

This article's main goal is to highlight the conflicts but also the similarities between religion and politics that exists in different subjects, views or situations. This study will have a theoretical part but also an empirical part. The empirical part will be supported by the theoretical part of the study in which we will try to demonstrate the assumptions written above. The empirical part will analyze concrete case being the church's reaction to the legislative proposal of legalizing prostitution. Choosing this (...) topic for discussion, in the context of the relations between the Romanian Orthodox Church and politics, is a scientific approach that aims to highlight and underline the reactions that the Romanian Orthodox Church (BOR) has to the controversial legislative proposals in Romania and elsewhere, such as the legalization of prostitution. Through our research we aim to achieve a brief overview of this topic, analyzing the reactions that BOR has, in the written press in Romania, on the issue of legalizing prostitution. Also, the theme may be considered a good source of knowledge on the Romanian society and how it accepts or not such a legislative proposal. (shrink)

The lifting of work restrictions for Romanian and Bulgarian citizens in the EU, in January 2014, encountered much resistance both in European political discourse and the media, as these migrants became demonised and presented as social and economic threats. In this article, we show how the Romanian press dealt with such discriminatory discourses against the Romanian migrants. We conduct a thorough Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of news items published in Romanian press, prior to the lifting of (...) work restrictions, and we argue that the Roma emerged as the perfect scapegoats that could explain the deviant and unruly behaviours ascribed by some western media to ‘Romanians’. We also show how racism toward the Roma, referred here as Romaphobia, invokes non-racial practices and instead builds on a reverse victimhood narrative. Such discourses relate in a broader sense to well-established discursive practices in Romanian context but also to the political climate across Europe which is marked by increased intolerance toward the Roma. It is the mixture of stereotypical discourses and populist rhetoric that makes racism towards the Roma appear naturalised and increasingly more difficult to challenge. (shrink)

Public discourse on religious matters is a sensitive issue in Romania. It has raised heated debates for at least two reasons: on the one hand, the repressive policy of the Communist regime concerning religion created a strong boomerang-effect, a religious renaissance after 1989; on the other hand, there is a deep cleavage between the “two Romanias:” the urban and the rural, the modernized and the traditionalist, the liberal and the conservative. Religion still serves as a major cultural marker of national (...) identity, and the church is one of the most trusted institutions in Romania. We are exploring the hypothesis that the 2006-2007 religious icon scandal in Romania is a typical example of heated public debate in a transitional society. (shrink)

The issues of bioethics have been present in the Romanian space starting with the past century and have been tackled in different ways, according to context and the people interacting with them. Nonetheless, as a science, it became visible within the university context only towards the end of the past century when the faculties of theology in collaboration with those of medicine managed to introduce in the curriculum of the former and later on in that of the latter the (...) problems of bioethics, as well as their possible solutions. Though being a young science, bioethics succeeded in gaining ground as a university subject due to some doctors, famous in Romania and known as prestigious teachers lecturing in it, and due to its multiple challenges with which the Romanian society has been confronted lately. (shrink)

This article presents qualitative research conducted in an Israeli ova `extraction' clinic in Romania. Following on from a piece written by Jyotsna Gupta and published in this journal in February 2006, this article asks what kinds of feminist alliances can or should be made in the arena of reproductive technologies. In conversation with Gupta, the author asks whether `an ethic of universal human dignity' is possible or desirable. This article looks to the voices of Romanian egg sellers themselves as (...) a source of theoretical and political direction for transnational feminists who try to think about responses to reproductive technologies. (shrink)

The present study explored how Romanian women perceive in-vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and adoption as alternative pathways to traditional parenthood. Previous studies suggested that both...

In what way were the messages conveyed in Romanian advertisements influenced by the state of emergency declared due to COVID-19 pandemic? What kind of visual and textual messages did advertisements deliver to the target audience in this unique social context? Were there any specifics regarding their narrative or visuals? Based on the aforementioned questions, our hypothesis is that some Romanian advertisements that were distributed during the state of emergency had a social responsibility message, which is rather uncommon in (...) commercials. The first part of our study will underline the theoretical framework of this problem: defining and explaining social responsibility and its implications. The second part of the study will present our research. Its aim is to conduct a qualitative analysis of the advertising discourse from pragmatic, rhetoric and semiotic perspectives. The corpus of our research consists of several advertisements and campaigns that were most visible in the public sphere during the state of emergency, both online. We will start by identifying the visual elements, narrative techniques and argumentative strategies, explaining the way they function as an instrument to increase social responsibility. We will approach the message of the advertisements from a speech acts theory point of view, then undergo a process of identifying the argumentative tactics that are being used and, finally, we will conduct a semiotic analysis. In the end, we will underline a series of conclusions regarding the narrative and the visual specifics of the analysed contents and we will highlight some ethical aspects of the advertisements. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper presents and briefly analyses some of the provisions of a Romanian legislative proposal which arrived at the Presidency for ratification twice, in slightly different forms, and which was rejected twice: the first time at the Presidency in October 2004, and the second at the Constitutional Court in July 2005. The proposal was finally dropped in February 2006. My intention here is to point to some of the most problematic deficiencies of the legislative document in the hope (...) that this may assist with future debates and regulations on assisted reproduction either in Romania or elsewhere. I have isolated the features to be discussed under two headings: (1) whose are the rights to reproduce, that the document claimed to ‘acknowledge, regulate and guarantee’ and (2) what is the status of the embryo, the child and the surrogate mother? (shrink)

This book explores the Romanian Revolution in relation to the ongoing questions around its authenticity. It offers a critical theoretical re-examination of the revolution using the concept of performative contradiction as an analytic tool.

The multiplicity of Islamic interpretations is reflected in the heterogeneous nature of the Romanian Muslim communities. The internal fragmentation and disunity of Muslim communities, intra-Islamic difficulties, ideological and sectarian rivalry, success of Salafism among certain groups, the absence of stronger and more visible Islamic alternative discourses and the lack of interest in finding adequate mechanisms to facilitate the integration of the new Muslims in society are some of the general problems of the Romanian Muslims. Local Islamic revival has (...) an ethno-cultural dimension, a religious and even a political one as external disputes are imported in the Romanian context and affects the way Muslims define and practice Islam. Some Rroma and indigenous Tatar-Turkish adopted the neo-traditionalism consolidated in the second half of the last century and promoted by the most active Sunni NGOs in Romania. Some converts emancipated from the ideological control by conservative and neoconservative Islamic currents and are in search of progressive or mystical interpretations; other new Muslims found safety in the Salafi’s certitudes and rigid rules. Case study findings presented in this article may suggest that the more it depends on formal rituals, external behavior and rigid canonical displays of religiosity, the more fragile the Muslim identity becomes. A vulnerable constructed Self conceives differences and alterity as an attack against personal identity, hence the increasing aggressive and intolerant, superior Salafi attitudes. The more it is built on universal values, inner experience, ethical convictions, the more open and capable of integrating alterity and fostering positive relations with people of different religions becomes Muslim identity. (shrink)