While tracking down some information I want to share I rabbit-trailed to this forthcoming book by Baylor U. professor Christopher Marsh: Religion and the State in Russia and China: Suppression, Survival, and Revival (Continuum). It's coming out on January 20. As I looked at the chapter headings I thought - this looks valuable an interesting. I note them here, mostly for my own reference.
- Introduction - From Forced Secularization to Desecularization
- Ch. 1 - The Theological Roots of Militant Atheism
- Ch. 2 - Evicting God: Forced Secularization in the Soviet Union
- Ch. 3 - Faith in Defiance: The Persistance of Religion under Scientific Atheism
- Ch. 4 - Russia's Religious Renaissance
- Ch. 5 - China's Third Opium War: The CCP's Struggle with Religion
- Ch. 6 - Keeping the Faith: The Persistence of Religious Life in Communist China
- Ch. 7 - From Religious Anesthesia to Jesus Fever
- Ch. 8 - Man, the State, and God
Marsh's intro sentence reads: "One of the greatest ironies of the twentieth century must be that, while in the democratic West secularization was being proclaimed as the futre of the world, in the Communist East untold millions were suffering for their faith as they resisted the onslaught of forced secularization in the name of science and progress."
Marsh's book is about "the failed attempt to create an atheistic society" and what we can learn from this.
You can read the entire introduction at amazon.com, which is very cool.
