Keston Center Scholar Will Address Issue of Gender and Faith in Communist Countries

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Media contact: Lori Fogleman, (254) 710-6275
WACO, Texas (Nov. 11, 2014) –Alina Urs, a scholar in Baylor University’s Keston Center for Religion, State and Society, will present a lecture titled, "Gender and Faith in Former Communist Countries: Yesterday and Today," at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 13, in the Michael Bordeaux Research Center (Room 316) in Baylor’s Carroll Library.
“The relationship between communism and women presents all sorts of challenges,” Urs said. “On one hand, communism brought a forced emancipation, as everyone had the right and obligation to work. On the other hand, the expectations placed on women as mothers and care givers for the family did not change.”
Urs will address many questions addressing the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in her lecture, including: What were the specific dangers women had to deal with under a totalitarian regime? Did men and women react differently to infringement of rights? And what are the consequences of dictatorship that we still deal with presently?

“When it comes to repression, we didn’t even know the exact number of women who were imprisoned for political reasons under communism in Romania,” she said. “Now, we’ve discovered they’re in the thousands. And their stories are worth hearing.”
Urs is an expert at the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and Memory of the Romanian Exile in Bucharest, Romania. She has also served as a researcher and project coordinator at the Centre for Studies in Contemporary History and at the Centre for the Investigation of Communist Crimes.
She graduated from the University of Oxford, St. Antony’s College, with a master’s degree in Russian and East European Studies. Her current research focuses on church-state relations and the mechanisms of repression during the communist dictatorship in Romania.
Urs said the lecture will appeal to those interested in the contemporary history of Eastern Europe, methods of repression and persecution and/or the impact of faith on people’s lives under totalitarian regimes.
The lecture is free and sponsored by the Keston Center. The center, formed in 1959, encourages the study of religion in communist, post-communist and other totalitarian societies and the relationship between religion and Marxism.
For more information, call the Keston Center at (254) 710-4647.
by Kristen Bennett, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805
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