Also note that in Romania (Transylvania) were Unitarian, Calvinist, and Lutheran.
Depraved vampires. (I know - I’m a day or 2 late for the Halloween jokes, but I couldn’t resist.)
Lithuania is overwhelmingly Catholic. Estonia and Latvia are mixed Lutheran, Catholic, and Orthodox (as witnessed by the supposedly fictitious “Latvian Orthodox Church” in an episode of Seinfeld, which, as it turns out, actually exists!)
In the Protestant monastery near where I live (in Western Switzerland), a lot of the novices and younger sisters, most of whom land here through a first contact with the community in Taizé, are from Central Europe, Scandinavia or Baltic countries.
I am so thankful we have moved beyond that kind of feudal ignorance.
In the US paganism occasionally flared up, especially a few decades ago, mostly as an ostentatious reaction against the then-strong Christian culture. I never saw anything like what I read about ancient pagan religion.
This in itself is intriguing.
There is no reason, in the nature of things, why Protestants could not have monastic communities that seek to follow perfectly the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience. However, as a general rule, the more conservative evangelicals (Baptists, Pentecostals, Holiness et al) just make the assumption that everybody gets married and, if nature permits, have children. I have to wonder how comfortable a church home they are for involuntarily same-sex-attracted people who choose to obey the Scriptures and live celibately, rather than offend God by practicing sodomy. “Back in the day” many of them just went ahead and got married, possibly taking their SSA to the grave with them.
Yes. In fact, some historians argue that the Protestant reformation did not so much empty the monasteries as turn whole societies into communities of sorts, regulated by a common set of rules, where marriage and family life were seen as the main path to holiness.
Thanks for that info. I wouldn’t have guessed that.
You might find this interesting.OddBird:
This in itself is intriguing.
That’s because it’s not “southeastern Poland.”
Today. In the 1500s, not as much.
Well, ceteris paribus — all other things held constant, wars, partitions, border redrawings, etc., southeastern Poland would have been Calvinist today.HomeschoolDad:
That’s because it’s not “southeastern Poland.”
The ‘problem’ with this map is that it purports to depict the state of affairs in the 16th and early 17th centuries, but it shows the political boundaries of the present day.
What you’re seeing as ‘Poland’ looks to me more like Lithuania (of that period). And, in the late 1500s, Calvinism took root there.
Again, referring to today’s Lithuania, given all the other historical events between then and now.HomeschoolDad:
Today. In the 1500s, not as much.
So, if you want to make the case that “once those lands became Poland once again, and once Poland dealt with Communism, nevertheless we should expect that this area would still be largely Calvinist”… then I’d say that you’re misreading the map and what it’s trying to say to us.
Her great-great-great-great-great-…-great grandparents might have been, though.
Noted. That’s why I think that the map is misleading, at best. It causes us to want to impose modern-day realities on the context of 16th/17th century Europe.