Victoria Fomina’s blog

Some reflections on cognitive and social processes in the making of religious traditions.

Public Relations Failures by Russian State Officials: A Botched Cultural Transmission?

In 2018, during a public meeting, Olga Glatskikh, head of the Sverdlovsk Region Youth Politics Department, gave the following response to a question about the lack of state funding for youth

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Reasoning against Faith: When Clerics Intervene in Popular Religion

In their recent book The Enigma of Reason (2017), Mercier and Sperber debunk the popular view of reason as a source of disinterested, accurate knowledge about the world. The function of reason, they

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How Can a Painting Make One Lose One’s Faith?

In 1867, the deeply religious Fyodor Dostoyevsky visited the Basel Art Museum and saw for the first time the original of Hans Holbein’s painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. His wife

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