General

Kristina Stoeckl's research is set at the intersection of political theory, comparative cultural history and sociology of religion with a special focus on East European Orthodox Christianity. Her work is motivated by a profound interest in philosophical questions of political nature, in particular the relationship between the freedom of the human subject and community, and by a genuine perplexity about the breach between Western modernity and traditional and/or religious worldviews. With her research on the Orthodox world, she wants to make a case in point about the ambiguous relationship between the modern and the traditional and she wants to explore philosophically and empirically the difficulties of negotiating modern secular and traditional and religious views about legitimate authority, personal freedom and human rights.

Orthodox Christianity and politics: multiple secularisms, liberal norms and traditional religion (habilitation-project)

The overall aim of the research-project is to look at religion-state relations in the context of Orthodox Christianity in order to explore the normative-theoretical and conceptual challenges which religious traditional arguments pose to contemporary debates on religion and politics and postsecularism. In particular, the research project wants to contribute to the definition of "multiple secularism of modern democracies" (Alfred Stepan) with regard to Orthodox Christianity through the study of religion-state relations in Greece, Russia, Ukraine, and Orthodox "diaspora" communities. The choice of these cases is motivated by the fact that they cover a variety of majority-minority conditions of Orthodoxy in different political contexts, a perspective which promises innovative comparative findings in terms of multiple patterns of secularism: Orthodoxy as established church (Greece), as non-established but de- facto privileged church (Russia), as competing denominations on one territory (Ukraine) and as minority faith-communities in Western liberal democracies ("diaspora"). The project wants to assess theoretically and normatively debates about democracy and liberal norms in the Orthodox context and evaluate religious-traditional and cultural-majoritarian strategies of argumentation for contemporary debates on politics and religion.