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Regardless of the role religion plays in the world today, ie despite the significant deprivatization of faith in the sociocultural space & in politics, contemporary Czech sociology of religion is in rather poor shape. The author presents a number of factors to explain this, including the legacy of the communist regime, & low levels of church attendance in the Czech Republic, the latter having been erroneously interpreted as non-religiosity. But the author focuses mainly one other reason: the discordant legacy of Czech pre-communist sociology of religion & the neighboring field of social studies. Two different traditions of the subject are identified - the 'profane' sociology of religion, founded by T. G. Masaryk, & Catholic religious sociology. Although the former legacy declared itself non-religious & even anti-clerical, in the case of many of its followers this claim was only partially true. In the 1930s & 1940s, when they (especially Prague's sociological school, which formed a certain opposition to Masaryk) turned more toward Durkheimian attitudes, they emphasized, for example, their own religious experience as a necessary tool for understanding piety. On the other hand, Catholic religious sociology was closely related to church activism, policy, & contemporary social work, ie, strictly conservative & anti-modern. Its way of understanding modern society was discounted by the former group of scholars, though to at least some degree, the two legacies shared similar methodological approaches. Both certainly seem outdated today, but their theoretical & methodological discussions & their findings remain of importance. Consequently, a re-thinking of these legacies & their theoretical backgrounds is still significant for the sociology of religion today.

The study deals with pilgrimages to Esquipulas, Guatemala, and patterns of miracle in terms of their perception by the pilgrims reaching this prominent religious hub of Central America. Two key pilgrimage discourses are distinguished: traditional Maya pilgrimage, based on regular, calendar customs, and conventional Catholic pilgrimage, founded on occasional journeys to fulfil a vow. The Western understanding of miracle as a transgression of "natural laws" or "common course of nature" is relativized and contested arguing that the ethnographic evidence of Esquipulas shows not only different, but also opposite conceptions. Then, the study presents a spectrum of miracle ideas drawing from the Maya as well as European - the case of Lourdes is exemplary here - traditions in terms of the degree of their uncommonness. It is concluded that anthropology has to comprehend miracles as marvels in its cultural context; nevertheless, there is a widespread idea among many cultures that miracle is something wonderful, related to the awareness of non-obviousness of certain things and phenomena. Miracles find its content and meaning within particular cosmology, but, anchored in the psychological characteristics of the astonishment and the difference between usual and unusual or ordinary and extraordinary, they refer to features of human mind in a more general way.

This article examines the issue of the genderedness of the philosophical canon. In the theoretical part of the article the author gives evidence of the constructed nature of the philosophical canon, which in the Euro-American space is clearly androcentric. She summarises criticism to date of the philosophical canon by feminist historians of philosophy and describes the results of their research, which is directed at several areas: uncovering forgotten women philosophers of the past; analysing philosophers' views on gender; identifying the genderedness of basic philosophical categories; criticising the dualism that characterises modern philosophical discourse; and finally, making various reinterpretations of the concepts of past philosophers. Each of these approaches has particular potential and limitations, which the author seeks to identify. In the second part of the article the author presents the results of her analysis of philosophy textbooks and books on the history of philosophy published in the Czech Republic after 1990. She conducted her analysis by comparing information on women philosophers contained in the texts of the selected books with the information available in other literature (mainly English). She also employed the typological method, and she identified five 'strategies' of marginalisation of women philosophers, whereby textbooks used at Czech universities contribute to maintaining the existing philosophical canon.

The article deals with the factors that affect the tax morale of the population of the Visegrad Four countries, i.e. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The evaluation of the answers of the respondents of the European Values Study to the question of whether they justify tax evasion serves as an indicator of tax morale. The authors work on the one hand with the frequency of answers expressing a complete rejection of fraud and on the other hand with average answers on a scale from 1 to 10. Respondents from Slovakia were found to be justifying tax fraud the most, and Polish and Hungarian residents agreed with tax evasion the least. Furthermore, the dependence of tax morale on gender, religion and satisfaction with the political system was analysed. Using contingency tables, it was found that all the monitored factors have a statistically significant effect on the tendency of people to justify tax evasion. The only exceptions were the factor of religion in the Czech Republic and the influence of satisfaction with the political system in Poland, where the relationship with tax morale was not confirmed.

Although the Czech Republic is usually regarded as one of the most secular countries in Europe, current sociological surveys indicate that there is still a strong interest in supernatural and spiritual questions. This article begins by documenting the popularity of various religious concepts and then proceeds to analyse the socio-demographic factors that influence religious beliefs. The author tries to answer the question of whether and how people who believe in some kind of religious phenomenon differ in terms of sociodemographic characteristics from those who do not believe. There are two dimensions behind religious statements: a 'traditional' Christian outlook and an 'alternative' view connected with a belief in the power of magic. Further analyses indicated that traditional and alternative religious beliefs are connected with numerous socio-demographic characteristics, the most important of which is religious socialisation, measured by the frequency with which a person attended at religious services as a child and by the religious denomination of a person's mother.

The Czech Republic is often said to be one of the most secular countries in Europe, or even in the world. For this, in accord with the secularization thesis, the modernization is often mentioned, where it was supposed that it automatically leads to the decline of religion in society. In my paper, I recapitulate the basic points of the secularization thesis and dissect its criticism which seems to be aimed at the idea, that secularization represents just an unintended effect of modernization. Based on this criticism, I deduce resources for analysis of the religious situation in the Czech Republic. Furthermore, I prove that Czech society is not so much atheist, but more dechristianized, and I focus on reasons of this dechristianization in political, social and class conflicts, which had, according to my opinion, a great impact on Czech church's religionism. In this paper, I address the conflicts between socialist movement and the Catholic Church, which as a result had a substantial effect on the dechristianization of the czech working class.

The article deals with the 1938 treatise History of the All- Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), abbreviated AUCP(b) - an official treatise from the Stalin era of the USSR which was published on a mass scale. The author puts his reflections in two contexts: 1. the internal Marxist dispute over "orthodoxy", which Stalin resolved by publishing (and co-authoring) this "canonical book", and 2. the myth-forming context, which shows how totalitarian regimes present themselves with their "canonical books". He considers publications preceding the analyzed book, which after Lenin's death included texts by Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin and Leon Trotsky. Then he considers the actual book, focusing in more detail on the absence of two topics and concepts - the state and culture. He pays particular attention to the chapter on dialectic and historical materialism written by Stalin, which completes the simplistic interpretations in the so-called Stalinist Marxism. Like L. Kolakowski, he concludes that the entire Stalinist concept is naturalistic (meaning the naive naturalism of the late 19th century: Marxism guarantees a "scientific world view") and naively nomothetic (all fundamental claims have the form of unquestionable laws).

Infertility is a problem that affects around 15% of Czech couples of reproductive age. Using data from the survey 'Marriage, Work, Family' the objective of this analysis is to identify the attitudes that Czech men and women maintain towards various strategies for overcoming infertility (adoption, different forms of assisted reproduction) and the factors that influence and shape these attitudes. The fi rst part of the analysis looks for the determinants behind attitudes towards adoption and assisted reproduction in the respondent's external characteristics. For example, education and religion were found to have a signifi cant influence. More educated respondents are more open to methods of assisted reproduction; religious respondents are more open to adoption. In terms of inner determinants (the respondent's attitude patterns) the authors, building on the preference theory proposed by Catherine Hakim, found a preference effect among women. The fi ndings are seemingly paradoxical: of three groups of women (work-centred, home-centred, and adaptive) it is work-centred women (and the partners of work-centred women) who are most likely to take various infertility strategies into consideration. The third part of the analysis – an analysis of the external determinants of attitudes towards infertility strategies – revealed that in some cases attitudes are influenced by the characteristics of the partner more than by the respondent's own characteristics – in particular, the woman's attitudes are shaped more by the characteristics of her partner than by her own characteristics.