Orthodox Parish in Sociological Perspective: Echo of Theory within the Walls of Empirics

Abstract

The parish is the basic yet the most significant level of social organization of the Russian Orthodox Church, since an individual personally encounters religion there and, further, develops a sense of belonging to the Church as a whole. However, empirical research shows that each parish is special in how it functions and how it is operated. In this vein, there is a need for a solid sociological conceptualization of empirical variations.
This paper follows a decade of research work by the Sociology of Religion group and suggests a conceptualization of parish as a community. This conceptual model takes into account both the fundamentally general and the variable-specific elements, which makes it applicable for case-study of parishes and also allows comparison of the collected observations at the analytical level.