Word: rumanians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Evangelical Protestantism appears to be flourishing in, of all places, Communist Rumania. Though most Rumanian Christians are Eastern Orthodox, the Baptists, with about 180,000 members, claim to have baptized 10,000 converts last year. The 100,000 Pentecostalists claim 15,000 baptisms. The government has responded to all this activity with a series of harassments, and six Evangelical leaders boldly responded last month by issuing a public protest. "If you do not intend to give [civil] rights to Evangelical Christians, then declare it openly," they said...
Titled "Appeal for Respect of Human Rights for Evangelical Believers in Rumania," the 20-page petition accuses the regime of violating the Helsinki declaration of 1975, in which 35 nations promised to respect religious and other liberties. The repression of Rumanian Evangelicals may be less harsh than that of other religious and political dissidents in Eastern Europe, but the petition raises important questions that the government may have to answer at next month's Belgrade conference to review the Helsinki accord. The petition charges three basic types of persecution...
...major author of the petition is Oxford-educated firebrand Josif Ton, 42, a Baptist pastor in Ploiesti. Within a few hours after the petition was broadcast over the U.S.-run Radio Free Europe, Rumanian police picked up Ton and his cosigners. During a series of interrogation sessions that began at 7:30 a.m., three of the six leaders were punched and kicked. After four weeks of grilling, the Evangelicals were released-with a warning that they remain in danger of being prosecuted for conspiracy or treason...
...Rumanian-born Serban, who has become the latest fad hero of the self-styled experimentalists, the text is simply a mask that must be ripped off to reveal the unconscious, irrational blood flow of the play. The dramatist is presumed unable to capture the Id of his work in words, so the director imposes a distracting new subtext that blurs, blots out or mangles the real text. In The Cherry Orchard, earlier this season, Serban altered the living space of Chekhov's drama to a kind of surrealistic all-white silo in which Mme. Ranevskaya ricocheted around without...
Vlad met a fitting end not always stressed by Rumanian historians. After being captured by Turks in 1476, he was decapitated. His head was sent to Constantinople, where it was publicly displayed on a stake-the impaler impaled. Dracula's headless body is said to be buried in the monastery of Snagov, near Bucharest. It was there last week that a party-line-conscious priest observed of Rumania's new hero: "Vlad was a good Christian and he loved the truth. If he impaled people it was just to put a stop to injustice by noblemen at home...