Vlad Naumescu is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Central European University (Vienna/Budapest). He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Eastern Europe and South India on different Eastern Christian communities, looking at the practices, institutions and politics that shape local traditions. His most recent research brings these cases together into a comparative study of pedagogies of prayer in Eastern Christianity. He is the author of Modes of Religiosity in Eastern Christianity: Religious Processes and Social Change in Ukraine (2007), co-editor of Churches In-between: Greek Catholic Churches in Postsocialist Europe (2008), a special issue on Learning Spirit Possession (Ethnos 2012) and several articles exploring, among others, the role of imagination in monastic training, temporalities of religious transmission, doubt in ritual, moral formation in Orthodoxy, religious-secular formations in state socialism and after. Naumescu combines ethnography with filmmaking in his research, producing several documentary films that speak to his writings: Birds’ Way (2009), Bread of Life: The Word/The Silence (2014). He is currently working on a monograph which explores ritual, history and ethics in the Old Belief.