Ringvorlesung: Klaus Buchenau - Ex occidente lux(us). Religiöse Impulse aus den USA im östlichen Europa des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts

Ex occidente lux(us): US Religious Influences in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Large-scale emigration from Eastern Europe to the US took place in the nineteenth century, a process that had far-reaching and often unforeseeable consequences. The impact of migration on religion is explored here to show that westward migration actually led, in a rather complex way, to the "easternization" of the religious sphere in the Northern Carpathian region. People who in the Habsburg Empire had been separated from the Orthodox Church and via the Union of Rome had been brought closer to Western Christendom used US-American religious freedoms to rediscover their Orthodox roots. Ultimately, they invested their financial and cultural capital in order to initiate an exceptionally successful missionary movement in their former homelands. This resulted in hundreds of thousands of people in Eastern Slovakia and Carpatho-Ukraine turning to Orthodoxy. Such entanglements are again important today, as evident in the case of the impact of "Made in the USA" Ortohdoxy theology in today's Ukraine.

Klaus Buchenau ist seit April 2013 Professor für Geschichte Südost- und Osteuropas an der Universität Regensburg. Zu seine Forschungsinteressen gehörten u.a. vergleichende serbisch-kroatische Geschichte mit Bezug auf Informalität und Korruption, wie auch Orthodoxie und Katholizismus, und die Geschichte der adligen Familie Thurn-und-Taxis in ehem. Jugoslawien.