Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe

1. Introduction
Stephen A. Smith

Part I. Religion and Social Science in Eastern Europe

2. Piety by the Numbers: Social Science and Polish Debates About Secularization in the 1960s and 1970s
Jim Bjork

3. The Shepherds’ Calling, the Engineers’ Project, and the Scientists’ Problem: Scientific Knowledge and the Care of Souls in Communist Eastern Europe
Patrick Hyder Patterson

4. Romanian Spirituality in Ceauşescu’s ‘Golden Epoch’: Social Scientists Reconsider Atheism, Religion, and Ritual Culture
Zsuzsánna Magdó

Part II. Science, Religion and the Paranormal

5. Inculcating Materialist Minds: Scientific Propaganda and Anti-Religion in the USSR During the Cold War
James T. Andrews

6. Tsiolkovskii and the Invention of ‘Russian Cosmism’: Science, Mysticism, and the Conquest of Nature at the Birth of Soviet Space Exploration
Asif Siddiqi

7. Witchdoctors Drive Sports Cars, Science Takes the Bus: An Anti-Superstition Alliance Across a Divided Germany
Monica Black

Part III. The Socialist Life-Cycle: Between Science and Religion

8. Writing Rituals: The Sources of Socialist Rites of Passage in Hungary, 1958–1970
Heléna Tóth

9. In Search of Rationality and Objectivity: Origins and Development of East German Thanatology
Felix Robin Schulz

Part IV. Socialism and the Problem of Religious Heritage

10. Religion and Nauka: Churches as Architectural Heritage in Soviet Leningrad
Catriona Kelly

11. The Antireligious Museum: Soviet Heterotopia between Transcending and Remembering Religious Heritage
Igor J. Polianski

12. Religion, Science and Cold War Anti-Communism: The 1949 Cardinal Mindszenty Show Trial
Paul Betts

Keywords: History, European History, History of Science, Religion and Society