Our seventh day began with an engaging lecture on the historical development of religion in Europe from Ancient Greece until the Early Modern era, delivered by Bojan Aleksov.
Bojan drew our attention to the importance of being aware of what perspective we examine religion from, in this case through a historical perspective, tracing its development through history. Beginning with the Roman Empire, Bojan illustrated how Christianisation spread across Europe, before breaking up into numerous sects. The conflict between these sects was a hallmark of the intolerance some Christian denominations had for each other.
Alongside the growth of Christianity was also the importance of Islam, and how Islam is a religion that is more accepting of Christianity and Judaism, because they simply haven’t ‘finished the book’. Bojan illuminated many important aspects of how religion within Europe has grown and what role it plays in society today.
Our language class took a temporary detour from a primary focus on the language to also examine more of the culture of Romania. This included examining what stereotypes about Romania that we had brought in prior to this project and what truth, if any, there was in these prejudgments. In addition to this, we discussed how other countries perceived Romania, and we were struck by how different countries interpret Romania (and other cultures as well) in such radically different ways. In addition to our examination of Romania, we looked at Europe more broadly and the nature of stereotypes across different countries.
In our group session we reviewed the footage that we had taken for the documentary and divided up the final tasks for the project. We allocated roles for our final presentation and looked into some possibilities for writing blogs about the many and varied elements about Romania that we had discovered.
European London 