Religion, memory and the making of resilience: Post-secular insights from Central and Southeast Europe

This article examines how religious mnemonic repertoires shape divergent forms of collective resilience in contemporary crises. It conceptualizes religion as a reconfigurable mnemonic infrastructure linking past, present and future through narratives, symbols and ritual forms. By introducing a distinction between reproductive and transformative resilience, it explains how memory mobilization can either sustain existing normative and institutional orders, or enable their reinterpretation and reconstitution. Drawing on case studies from Serbia and Poland, it shows how these dynamics are enacted by institutional and vernacular actors across different socio-political settings. At the same time, the analysis highlights overlapping configurations of mnemonic agency, resilience beneficiaries and outcomes, including competing trajectories and interpretative grey zones.