Friday, May 2, 2008
by: Ines Angeli Murzaku, Ph.D.

The international research team includes two political scientists and two religious studies/theology specialists respectively:

• Lavinia Stan (Principal Investigator) at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada is author of three books including Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and The Former Soviet Union.
• Sabrina Ramet (Collaborator) is a leading authority on religion and politics in Eastern Europe, author of nine books and professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.
• Lucian Turcescu (Co-Investigator) at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada is president of the Canadian Patristics Society and author of three books including Gregory of Nyssa and the Concept of Divine Persons.
• Ines Angeli Murzaku (Collaborator) at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, USA, is author of Catholicism, Culture, Conversion: The History of the Jesuits in Albania and the up-coming Quo Vadis Eastern Europe? Religion, State and Society after Communism.
  

The research supported by the SSHRC will investigate church-state relations in the enlarged European Union resulting from the acceptance of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Slovenia in 2004, and of Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. The research will seek to understand: 1) how these new democratic states treat their religious majorities and minorities; 2) how closely church-state relations in each country approximate democratic requirements; and 3) how different church-state relations are in new and old EU member states.

For more information please contact:
Ines Angeli Murzaku, Ph.D.
(973) 275-5845
murzakui@shu.edu