Must religion die? Long live religion! Religious adaptation to the challenges of time

Abstract

Vyacheslav Ageev's book Religion must die, or in whom will we believe after God is something between a work of non-fiction and a modern textbook on religious studies for specialists and those interested in the history and problems of religions, and particularly the Ukrainian religious context. The author's sense of humor and the occasionally daring way of presenting the material keeps the reader's attention firmly fixed on the text at hand. The book consists of five chapters in which the author examines religion in combination with such phenomena as money, power, madness, pandemic, crisis, sin, sex, and SpaceX. Describing the multiplicity of religions, the author also posits the question of whether a criterion that could help distinguish a true religion from a false one is possible – and whether we need to have such criteria at all. In addition to the interaction of religion with the above-mentioned phenomena, the author examines the very structure of religion, and reflects on its past and inevitably-extant future, full of new and surprising challenges and transformations.