My review of Marc Loustau’s Hungarian Catholic intellectuals in contemporary Romania: reforming Apostles has just been published in Politics, Religion, and Ideology. Here’s the first paragraph:
Hungary is the site of one of Europe’s longest lasting and most successful right-wing populist movements. But for Hungarian populists, Hungary is more than the nation-state itself. It is the community of ethnic Hungarians who live both inside and outside of the national borders. In his deft study of ‘the Transylvanian Hungarian intellectual tradition,’ anthropologist and Unitarian Universalist lay preacher Marc Roscoe Loustau details some of the ways in which politics and religion construct each other while blending together to form a particular ideology (8). In the case of the Szeklers, an ethnic Hungarian speaking minority living in Romania, this means following the efforts of ethnic minority intellectuals—whose work is supported by a combination of the Hungarian and the Romanian states and a complex of non-governmental organizations—to develop a ‘pedagogical mode and rationale’ devoted to the creation of ‘ethnic minority and ethical self-consciousness’ (2).
To read the rest of the review, for free, click here.
