The current emphasis placed by specialists in global history (Zahra 2016; Sarkisian, 2019; Hillis 2021) also impacted religious studies. Even if there were attempts to map the interactions between the North American religious landscape and Eastern Europe in the interwar period (Carlson 1993; Miller 2012; Clark 2020), the joint mobility of concepts and theologians/clergy members between the two areas remain highly under-researched. Previous scholarly research on Romanian-American religious interactions (Gârdan 2007; Săsăujan, in Bremer 2008; Clark 2020) limited their focus only to the Romanian context. Dwelling on a vast array of archival material (Romanian National Archives, regional branches of the National Archives), this study endeavors to comparatively highlight the mutual theological transfers between the American Protestant groups and the Romanian Orthodox Church during their interwar encounters. The dissemination of Evangelical ideas in the Romanian émigré milieu in the United States eventually echoed at home and led to the Orthodox popular religion hybridization and the formation of Orthodox groups of re-evangelizations known as the Lord’s Army (Oastea Domnului). Through its Orthodox bishopric, the Romanian presence in the US determined a constant accommodation of both the American state’s policies and the American religious landscape, especially in the Orthodox diasporas.
~Bibliography~ Bremer, Thomas (ed.), Religion and the Conceptual Boundary in Central and Eastern Europe. Encounters of Faiths, Houndmills: Palgrave, 2008. Carlson, Maria; No Religion Higher Than the Truth. A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1870-1922, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Clark, Roland, Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania: The Limits of Orthodoxy and Nation-Building, London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Gârdan, Gabriel, Episcopia Ortodoxă Română din America parte a Ortodoxiei Americane, Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2007. Hillis, Faith, Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s-1930s, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Miller, Matthew Lee, The American YMCA and Russian Culture. The Preservation and Expansion of Orthodox Christianity, 1900-1940, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. Sarkisian, Aram. 2019. The Cross between Hammer and Sickle: Russian Orthodox Christians in the United States, 1908-1928. Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA. Zahra, Tara, The Great Departure. Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World, New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. Background image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Romanian_Orthodox_Church_in_North_America,_Regina,_1904.jpg.
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The Ethos of Dialogue and Education
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