The article raises the question of the reception of Dilthey’s book “Leben Schleiermachers” by Frank in his analysis of Schleiermacher’s work. On the one hand, the authors demonstrate the obvious presence of Dilthey’s vision of Schleiermacher’s philosophy of religion in Frank. On the other hand, they note original moments in Frank’s understanding of “Speeches on Religion”.

The consideration results in an obviousness of the constitutive role of Dilthey’s work in Frank’s interpretation of Schleiermacher. Essentially, the latter’s article presented to the Russian philosophical public not one, but two outstanding German thinkers: not only Schleiermacher, but also Dilthey. At the same time, this analysis performed suggests that the study of works by Dilthey, while translating and comprehending the works by Schleiermacher , enabled Franck to better appreciate the “selected affinity” between the thought of the German historian and his own emerging philosophical intentions. In that way, Dilthey became for Frank both a guide to the world of German and European spiritual culture in general, and a highly significant philosophical “interlocutor” who influenced not only directly – through the reception of certain specific ideas, such as the concept of “experience” or the distinction between “understanding” and “explanation”, but also through the interpretation of the heritage of such outstanding German thinkers as Hegel or Goethe, a description of the dynamics of European philosophical and theological ideas and, above all, the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology of Schleiermacher.

The article aims to discover potential of realistic phenomenology for analysis of prayer as the most significant form of religious language.

To that end, the prayer thematization in the framework of religious discourse (as exemplified in works of metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh and R. Schaeffler) is compared to theoretical statements of Reinach’s lecture course “Einleitung in die Philosophie”. The study of texts by metropolitan Anthony and Schaeffler on prayer identifies a basic opposition – between a canonic liturgical text and subjective experience of the one who prays, that opposition manifests itself in reasoning of ordinary discussions on the topic and is overpassed in different ways by the religious thinkers. At another point Reinach’s reflections on some regularities of inner experience, concentrating on the example of artistic forms, offer a new approach to the opposition between formalised ritual and personal experience. While analysing a phenomenon of empathy, Reinach concludes that traditional terms of “the one’s own and the stranger’s” applying to experience must be substituted with an opposition between the immediate and the mediated. From such point of view hymnography is comprehended as a form of symbolic mediation of the ideal contents of religious experience, which allows to speak about the “deprivatization” of religious experience as an original contribution of realistic phenomenology to the philosophy of religion.

In the 20^th century European culture found itself in a situation of mutual alienation of many areas of culture – science, religion, ethics, art, etc., what, in turn, raised a theme of the relationship between cognition and history in the transcendental theory of knowledge with new acuity. A significant role in that process belongs to philosophers: members of the Vienna Circle and, later, analytical philosophers, neo-Kantians of the Marburg and Baden schools, representatives of transcendental Thomism. Among the projects aimed at overcoming the crisis there is the project of Richard Scheffler, a German philosopher and theologian. Following after Kant, Schaeffler turns to the most different areas of philosophy: phenomenology, hermeneutics, neo-Kantianism of Cohen and Cassirer, analytical philosophy of language. In addition, the influence of the theology of Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Wilhelm Lotz can be traced in the writings of Schaeffler. The article considers the concept of religious experience by Richard Schaeffler, the underlying Schaeffler’s visions of the need of interpretation the regulating idea of God as a postulate of theoretical reason in the perspective of religious experience. It considers Schaeffler’s idea of the transcendental nature of the prayer speech and its performativity.

The paper studies how the long tradition of proving the existence of God is expressed in Protestant theology through the work of Paul Tillich and Alvin Plantinga. It is mainly analyzed which aspects of the works of those two thinkers can be attributed to the proof of the existence of God, to what extent they can be considered systematic and complete, to what type of evidence they relate. In order to thoroughly talk about the proof of the existence of God in the works of those two thinkers, a historical review of the tradition of proving the existence of God is to be made, with an emphasis on “classical” scholastic arguments. Having studied the work of Tillich and Plantinga, it becomes possible to give an answer to the question of how the tradition continued in their theology and can it be generally considered that it found a continuation in it?

Paul Tillich is one of the most famous Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, whose work belongs to the neoliberal direction in Protestant thought. Alvin Plantinga is an American analytical theologian, author of one of the most famous modern proofs of the existence of God. It seems that the thinkers have nothing in common. However, both of them worked with the same “material” (Christian doctrine), within the framework of the Protestant tradition in the twentieth century, which offered many unique and sometimes unexpected thoughts in philosophy and theology. The most important point of the study is a comparison of the works of Tillich and Plantinga. Of course, only in the sense in which evidence of the existence of God can be found in their work and that is not on all possible points.

Such tasks seem to be very relevant, because a comparative analysis of the work of two Protestant thinkers (almost contemporaries), while referring to different areas of Protestant theology, will help to gain a more complete picture of the intellectual culture of Protestantism of the twentieth century.

The article considers the socio-psychological aspect of Goffman’s frame analysis concerning the religious field in the process of everyday interaction. Such a methodological approach helps to imagine the process of inclusion of the Muslims in non-Muslim societies and their social recognition in a new way. By using the theory of frames, one can consider how different people recognize and evaluate religion in the process of everyday interaction. The article focuses on the division of religious, interreligious, civilizational, and ethnocultural frames. In addition, it takes into account the different levels of interaction in society: personal, group, public. The change of the frame depends on the level at which the interaction takes place, so that, in different situations, some frames may come to the forefront pushing others to the background. The study of the blurring of borders and the transition from one frame to another is of certain importance: what is evident in the context of the interreligious frame, in the case of the process of inclusion of Muslims in Western European societies. The interreligious frame intersects with the religious and civilizational one. The alike mixing of frames in the process of recognizing the situation of everyday interaction makes the issues that arise difficult to solve. The emphasis is placed on the fact that “religious” frames are often recognized through an ethnocultural frame, complicating the search questions (for example, religious questions are mixed with questions related to xenophobia).

The study argues for the need to analyze the activities of religious confessions in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet, which is a fundamentally new communication mechanism. Having studied that new type of communication of a religious organization and its followers through a detailed description of the structure of the sites, one can give a general description of the resources, which together can become the basis for further religious studies and sociological studies of the quality of the assimilation of the virtual space by religious confessions. The statistical method of information analysis is used as the leading method. The authors analyze the content of the official websites of various religious denominations in the sphere of the Russian-speaking Internet; provide a general description of the rating lists leaders for the sites with religious topics from which it can be concluded that they all have the necessary cultural and legal authority, which legitimizes their use and access to them in the minds of network users. In addition, it is argued that sites have the necessary information content, contain relevant information, and they are able to satisfy the interests of users with minimal effort. With all that in mind, it may be said that the study can supplement the area of knowledge devoted to the study of the involvement of religious organizations in the modern life of the information age.

W.B. Kristensen (1867–1953) is the prominent scholar of the 20^th century famous for his works on history and phenomenology of religion, the representative of the Dutch phenomenological school. He saw the task of phenomenology of religion in the systematization of historical phenomena, as well as in the ordering and comprehension of the historical material, which by that time was abundantly collected by the empirical sciences of religion.

The present publication offers translation of significant fragments from his book “The Meaning of Religion” posthumously published in 1960. Those are the second and third parts of “General Introduction” where Kristensen discusses important methodological foundations of his conception, as well as the first chapter of the Part I (“Introduction to Cosmology”) dedicated to religious conceptions of cosmic order in ancient religions.