Crossing the Boundaries between the State and the Church: The Case of an Orthodox Christian University

Abstract

Despite the standpoint that postulates the presence of a tight boundary between the state and the church in the area of education and that currently dominates in the public space, there are projects that are being initiated and realized today and that let us question its consistency. The aim of the article is to discuss these impossible projects exploiting the friction at the overlap. This article draws on participant observation fi eldnotes, as well as 24 in-depth interviews with the staff, students, and graduates of a private Orthodox Christian University, conducted in 2011. In interpreting the research results, the author employs the principle of explaining the entrepreneurial exploitation of uncertainty, which was introduced by David Stark who expounded on the notion of heterarchy as an organizational form conducive to the productive untangling of complex situations.