Formation of Religious Studies in Post-Soviet Belarus (original) (raw)

The article employs the term Religious Studies as a name for an academic discipline which studies religious phenomena in all its forms and dimensions and uses both analysis of experiential material and theoretical modeling for its constructions. Internationally, the study of religion separated from the broad centuries-old tradition of studying religion into an independent scholarly discipline for which religion constitutes the systematically studied exclusive research subject. Besides marking the discipline's frame it is essential, in order to describe Religious Studies in Belarus, to outline the historical context of the separation of Belarusian academic sphere from the united Soviet academic environment. The year 1991 is the starting point for the formation of the post-soviet academic research in Belarus; it may also be seen as the beginning of the Belarusian Religious Studies.