As a result of three decades of social-cultural transformation, Bulgarian literature and practice of religious education though still rare is increasing and improving. As the Church recovers, local parishes, monasteries, and convents become visibly re-socialised and motivated again to provide more adequate pastoral care for all ages. This study explores the importance of informal improvisation and innovation as an approach, in the best interest of children and youth, at a time when an effective, regulated mass public religious education system in Bulgaria is not likely to appear soon. At the same time, revitalised eparchial, parish, convent, and monastery centres start meeting actual needs of renewed church ethos, and begin to provide opportunities for religious socialisation of children and youth that is more functional. Based on direct and indirect experience, on observation, and on partial access to limited local empirical data (that is historically and/or anthropologically only partially explored and categorised), this paper contributes to the analysis of the following unresolved issue: how to direct research toward and keep account of well-known educational and pastoral practices, whether traditional or contemporary, that aid the effective and sustainable religious socialisation of children and youth.

The article is aimed at eliciting the deep, profound meaning of the religious upbringing of the human who is endangered nowadays with the loss or reduction of his/ her own identity, the identity of community, particularly family. This upbringing infusing the integrity of the personal, and society can be seen in the human's integral development covering the centre of a person’s being, his/ her spirituality. Spirituality can be seen from different perspectives. Spirituality aligned with religious upbringing awakens reflection upon how necessary it is to consider it one of the most important factors for determining complex human development. Therefore, the aspect of the religious upbringing in family is undertaken by the authors of this article, who would like to exemplify the importance of it in the reference to the Diary written by Anna Potocka from the Działyńscy. The author belongs to that famous noble family in Poland, who successfully helped others in expressing their love to God.

Some sociologists of religion think that countries in Central and Eastern Europe are expected quick and rapid secularization. Therefore it is interesting to continuously search out, how the religiosity of Slovakian youth is transformed against the background of continual social and culture changes. The main goal of the presented paper, based especially on its own empirical researches of 2006 and 2016, is a description related to the transformation of youth’s religiosity in Slovakia (an example of Spiš Diocese). The presented work is situated in the area of religion sociology and shows also the typology transformation of the sought out youth’s religiosity that is very useful. Empirical analyses are based on, linked to or compared with main models of changes in religiosity in the contemporary world.

Studies in sociology of education in recent decades have consistently found an advantage for students in denominational schools - those with religious subordination - in terms of educational performance, compared with those in secular schools. Although in Romania a large part of the students from pre-university education attend confessional schools this advantage has not been investigated for the Romanian case. Taking advantage of the increased validity of the Romanian baccalaureate exam, following the measures from 2011-2012 and the availability of the statistical data regarding the schools in Oradea (Bihor county), we checked whether the hypothesis of such an advantage is confirmed in the Romanian case. Applying bivariate analyzes by type of schools (secular vs. confessional) and by types of tracks of the net pass rates (from the total of the graduates) we find that, although the promotion rates are higher for denominational schools, the support for the hypothesis of an advantage of denominational schools is fragile as much of the difference can be attributed to the academic orientation of denominational schools and to the fact that they succeed, probably, in selecting students with better educational skills.

The issue of the effectiveness of teaching is constantly at the center of research. "Teachers count", presents the OECD report (2005), which confirms the research of the day that the work of the teacher contributes significantly to the performance of students. The question is how to capture the factors that influence school performance. The focus of the examination of the theoretical background is on the professional capital theory, with the emphasis on the examination of social / teaching capital in addition to the human capital and decision capital components. Our research is based on a secondary analysis of a questionnaire among teachers working in Calvinist institutions in 2017. The focus of our interest is on identifying the characteristics (frequency) and content (agreeing with norms) of staff capital and the need for teachers to develop collaborative networking opportunities for future professional development.

This paper describes actually methodical attempts to use library electronic resources in academic education. Some opportunities for improving the teaching of religious cultural heritage and for diversify the methods of assessment of students in Bulgarian universities are commented. The text describes the personal experience of the authors with students of 3rd-4th grades from the State University of Library Studies and IT (SULSIT), Bulgaria. Among the “best practices” are tasks of performing on-line survey of digital resources of periodicals from the digital resources of the “St. St. Cyril and Methodius” National Library, of making content analysis of the database on a particular subject, of preparing bibliographic descriptions of the new discovered resources, of writing historical analyses, of generating thematic bibliographies on topics related to religion, using the resources of the electronic catalogs of regional public libraries in the country.

This study aimed to investigate the influence of religious attitudes, namely Inclusion of Trancendence and Symbolic Interpretation on life goals and different aspects of mental health.
Participants (N = 604) filled in an online questionnaire including the Post-Critical Belief Scale (Martos et al., 2009), the short version of Aspiration Index (Martos et al., 2006), and the Mental Health Test (MHT; see Oláh et al., 2018).
We investigated the relationship between religious attitudes, life goals, and the subscales of mental health using path analyses. The Symbolic Interpretation of religious content predicts support for intrinsically motivated life goals, while the Inclusion of Transcendence predicts the refusal of extrinsic aspirations. Positive effects were revealed between the Inclusion of Transcendence and global well-being, strategies aim at creating and enchancing happiness, and resilience. Symbolic Interpretation was positively related to creative, executing individual and social efficiency, while negatively influenced resilience.
The Inclusion of Transcendence and Symbolic Interpretation separately predict different aspects of life goals and mental health, and jointly support a higher quality of life.

The aim of our study is to create a more detailed and accurate picture of the complex relationship between personality and religiousness by describing the person’s religiousness in a multidimensional way. The sample for study consisted of 240 subjects (161 females, 79 males; mean age: 22,53, SD= 2,98) who attended church at least occasionally. We divided up different types of religiosity by the way in which they are followed: compiling the participants’ different critiques based on their responses regarding religious practice, on the data from the Hungarian Shortened Post Critical Belief Scale (Martos et al., 2009), and the Hungarian version of the Age Universal I-E Scale (Kézdy et al., 2018). For the measurement of personality based on the Cloninger’s psychobiological theory, we used the Shortened Hungarian Cloninger Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI 56) (Paksi et al., 2009). K-means clustering and one-way ANOVA-s were used to explore and compare the patterns. The results of the study show that in terms of personality traits, there are significant differences between the different types of religiousness. Therefore, interpreting and analyzing piety and personality as a complex system could help to understand religious practice and education in a more differentiated way.

The global coronavirus pandemic that emerged at the end of 2019 and will reach its peak in 2020 has affected education systems worldwide and led to widespread, complete closure of schools, universities, and colleges. UNESCO estimates that a total of nearly 1.6 billion students worldwide have been affected by the closures of educational institutions. The indicator was the highest in the period from April 1 to April 5, when exactly 1,598,099,008 students were affected by the measures. This accounted for 91.3% of the world’s total learning community, with a total of 193 countries providing full nationwide remote teaching. In response to school clo-sures, UNESCO has proposed distance learning programs as well as open educational applications and platforms that have ena-bled schools and teachers to reach their students remotely and make online education easier (UNESCO, 2020). In addition to reviewing the recent literature and monitoring lockdown measures, the study also suggests a number of specific solutions.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical based understanding of the Romanian context of teacher work, which provides an opportunity to identify characteristics considered to affect teaching activities and gives a basis for planning and conducting other research on teachers working conditions. The paper is based on authors' research which is a secondary analysis of Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2013 database. The database contains the survey responses of teachers of lower secondary education (ISCED 2) and the principals of their schools. During the investigation cross/tables, cluster analysis, linear and logistical analyses were used. Based on our research results, we can see that the factors attributed both to the individuals and to the elements of pedagogical culture show a strong correlation with the characteristics of the teaching and the satisfaction with the teaching. Considering the factors attributed to the individuals, professional development and the total career time is the most influential factor of job satisfaction and teacher’s self-efficacy. Among the variables included in the school culture dimension, the effectiveness of teacher work, the disciplined atmosphere, the values of student/teacher relationships and the positive effects of teacher-teacher relationships indicated satisfaction and self-efficacy.

In the course of our research, we surveyed the educational programmes of the football academies of Hungary. We wished to reveal the educational aspects of the life of the students at the football academies. The purpose of our project is to comparatively analyse the formal and conceptual dimensions of the educational programmes of the academies through an analysis of the documents of the academies concerned. We also conducted semi-structured interviews with the heads of the social- and educational sections of the academies (N=6). We used the results of the interviews to check–confirm or refute–the results we found. We believe that the findings of our research make it possible for us to better understand the elements and value-based components of the educational dimensions of the football academies. In this way, our survey is similar to the projects of researchers who worked with local educational programmes (for example, Brezsnyánszky et al., 2000). As a conclusion of our research, we may point out that both the formal and conceptual dimensions of the educational programmes of the individual football academies are strongly heterogeneous, and the quality of their pedagogical programmes is often questionable. The results yielded by the analysis of the interviews suggest that although an educational-social department is present at each of the academies, some our former conclusions in connection with the general standards of the educational work were confirmed by the answers we received from our respondents. The academies, almost without an exception, produce their own educational programmes and carry out their educational work individually, and do not cooperate with the other institutions. There is, consequently, no uniform and standard educational work, and there is no professional documentation of the work going on either. In this way, the quality of educational work is not really able to improve.

Review of the book The pedagogy of witness. An anthropological-kreygmatic perspective, by Zbigniew Marek SJ & Anna Walulik CSFN