In the following study, we publish the results of our multiple cross-sectional study conducted at the Everness „lifestyle and awareness” festival in Hungary since 2016, focusing on the deviation from the religious situation in Hungary, the difficulties in conceptually defining the term ‚spirituality’, and the analysis of some empirical data. The growth of the increasingly popular ‚religious in its own way’ category since the second half of the 20th century and various research show that alternative approaches are emerging in addition to the traditional religious approach. The use of the concept of spirituality may provide some insight into these alternative methods, but due to its difficulties of typology, it does not fully cover reality. Festival religion provides a methodological and empirical framework for these inquiries that demonstrate the nature of alternative approaches. This kind of private religiosity deserves special attention and may encourage researchers to do more research on similar topics. Visitors to the Everness festival visit the event for mainly three reasons: to perform esoteric, spiritual activities, to perform psychologically relevant, self-knowledge exercises, and to practice healing methods that focus on physical and mental balance. We explored these three sets of visitor motivations empirically and present their results within the concept of festival religion.

Keywords: festival religion, spirituality, alternative religiosity, esotericism, awareness

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Between 2013-2017, I conducted research in an ERC research project in a micro-region of Moldova in Roma, Orthodox Romanian and Moldavian Csángó Pentecostal communities. The fieldwork-based analyses focused on the ritual practices of these communities, the relationship between migration and conversion, the modelling of conversion stories, etc. (The summarizing volume of the studies: “We have the gift of Christ in us.” Pentecostalism in Romanian, Roma and Csángó communities from Moldavia. Balassi Kiadó–Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület, Budapest–Kolozsvár, 2020.) Based on this research project, but expanding it with new fieldwork and research perspective, the study analyzes the story of a Csangó woman who converted to Pentecostalism in a Catholic village in Moldova. The analysis gives an insight into the functioning of the norms and institutions that determine the life of the person, the reaction of the Roman Catholic community, the response of the family and the strategy of the priest in the situation. Along the lines of John Lofland and Rodney Stark’s 1967 model defining aspects of religious conversions, I present the life events deemed most important in her approach to Pentecostalism, as well as the fundamental changes in her worldview.

Keywords: Pentecostalism, change of confession, religious conversion, Moldavian csangó

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Special difficulties arise for women even today if they wish to pursue their career as Protestant ministers. These difficulties are partly the disadvantages experienced also by women in other professions – like horizontal segregation and glass ceiling, expectations based on traditional gender roles, stereotypes and prejudices, or even discrimination –, but partly they derive from peculiarities not characteristic of secular professions, which mostly have to do with expectations related to roles based on the conservative values and norms characteristic of religious environments as well as with the fact that conditions and expectations have been tailored to men traditionally in this profession. In spite of these difficulties more and more women are choosing the ministerial profession all over the world, including Hungary. Our study investigates how the ministerial profession is constructed for women. We have focused on the formative personal decisions made in the course of women’s career as ministers as well as on those respective influences exercised by their personal environment and the religious institutions that had impact on their decisions. We have provided an overview of the career decisions made by female ministers along with criteria and difficulties related to the decisions. We drew the conclusion that the decisions outline three typical career strategies for female ministers. It is characteristic of all three career strategies that the decisions related to private life and the decisions related to the profession are very intertwined and interdependent. We argue that secular professions tend to be quite different from the ministerial profession in this respect. This study is based on our research („Nők a lelkészi pályán” NKFIH K-128313) in which we have analyzed 26 in-depth interviews with female ministers.

Keywords: clergywomen, ministerial career, personal and career decisions, gender roles, gendered expectations

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The paper investigates how the narrative of Hungarian society based on historical traumas is related to other factors such as sense of regional betweenness, memory, well-being or even the respondent’s personality (sympathy for authoritarian personality traits, political orientation, religiosity). Network analysis is used to explore the interactions between the variables under investigation. The results show that the most significant relationship is between political orientation and self-description focusing on historical trauma, and between the latter and sympathy for authoritarian personality traits, but there is also a significant relationship between religiosity and political orientation.

Keywords: collective identity, trauma, woundedness, network analysis

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