Religious Diversity in Post-Soviet Society. Ethnographies of Catholic Hegemony and the New Pluralism in Lithuania/Eds. Milda Alisauskiene, Ingo Schroder. Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. - 212 p. This book is the result of a three - year project (2007-2010) supported by Volkswagen Schiftung, entitled "The Catholic Church and Religious Pluralism in Lithuania and Poland". This book is one of page 307 results of a project related only to Lithuania. The book is an extremely coherent, theoretically and empirically rich analysis of contemporary Lithuanian religiosity, mainly based on anthropological and sociological material. The editors of the book assume that until now ethnographers (anthropologists) have focused more on describing the "survival strategies" of religion in the Soviet era, while almost completely ignoring the influence of secularism, which in fact is not only the result of Soviet anti - religious campaigns-it preceded Sovietization. The editors criticize this one-sidedness of past research and offer a balanced combination of the paradigm of de-secularization that now dominates the social sciences, and a careful look at the consequences of long and ongoing secularization. It is true that some processes clearly contrast with Soviet times and cannot be ignored: the rise of historical churches, primarily Catholicism; the rapid spread of new religions; and the revival of pre-Christian local religious forms. At the same time, the authors of the book understand how complex this process is and how it is transformed under the influence of continuing secular attitudes, the growth of religious consumerism and the pluralization of the religious field (p. 27-28). Ultimately, it is this last point - the pluralization of the previously almost exclusively Catholic milieu - that is the main axis of the entire book; and this axis can hardly be separated from the discussions surrounding religious revival and the influence of secularism. Is Lithuania a "Catholic country", ... Read more