The article examines the theoretical development of Czech sociology of religion during the period of communist rule, which widely affected the social sciences in general and research on religion in particular. The author divides the period into three different stages. First, from the very end of the 1940s to the beginning of the 1960s sociology as a whole was abolished as a 'bourgeois pseudo-science', and any discourse on religion was possible only in purely negativistic, anti-religious terms. However, some scholars (most notably A. Kolman, E. Kadlecová and I. Sviták) established less ideological attitudes and called for deeper sociological analyses of religion at the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s. Their 'revisionism' eventually won out in the 1960s, in the second stage, when Czech sociology of religion achieved international acceptance and Kadlecová became (for a short time) the author of the state's new religious policy. Although these scholars (V. Gardavský and M. Machovec) accepted a wider definition of religiosity and debated with Christian scholars, they remained Marxists. They were convinced religion is doomed to extinction. The last stage began after the violent termination of the Prague Spring in 1968 and lasted throughout the era of the so-called normalisation in the 1970-80s. Progressive scholars were removed from their posts. The official sociology of religion changed its name to 'scientific atheism', but the outcomes of its work were far from any standard of excellence, both in the theoretical and empirical fields. Research from the era of official neo-Stalinism was very poor in quality, but during that time very important unofficial scientific contributions did emerge, written by banned sociologists (E. Kadlecová, J. Šiklová), social theologians (B. Komárková), and Czechs in exile. Unfortunately, since 1989 the reception of these works has been narrow. With the abolition of official Marxist scientific atheism there is an opportunity for the spread of truly modern sociological approaches to religion - if only there were enough students.
The article provides a comparison of two monuments - one of
František Palacký in Prague and the second of Theodor Mommsen in Berlin. Both men were the key historians of their nations in the 19th century. Palacký has offered a master-narrative of Czech national past in his famous book The History of Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia and set the main structures of narrating Czech history for two centuries. Theodor Mommsen has become
a worldwide known historian due to his extraordinary History of Rome, for which he has obtained Nobel Price for Literature in 1903. Monuments of these historians were built at the beginning of the 20th century (Palacký’s in 1912, Mommsen’s in 1909). The paper focuses on structural similarities between the monuments, especially in the area of collective memory. Using the theory of
Maurice Halbwachs formulated just before World War II the essay points out that there is a fundamental connection between memory and space. The essay argues that there is no significant structural difference between Palacký’s and Mommsen’s monument in terms of shaping the collective memory. and Článek zahrnuje poznámkový aparát pod čarou
This article examines the evolution of the term tabula from antiquity onward and the use of it in middle ages and early modern age literature. It analyses in detail the term tabulae ecclesiae finding its triple meaning in the Central European environment: 1) tabulae written on parchment (later on paper) and fixed on a board in the church – these contained information and instructions for laymen, those in the sacristy or in the choir contained normative constitutions or doctrinal auctoritates for clerics, 2) tabulae on the church walls near the high-altar contained lists of persons to be remembered in liturgy permanently; their external form were frescos framing their names like funeral tablets, 3) the same term tabulae ecclesiae is used also in the sense of financial cash resulting from a church collection. In all cases the ideological connection of medieval church boards to antique legistic texts (1.), to fasti (2.) or to the external form of a real board only (3.) is examined.