This anthology, edited by Jenny Vorpahl and Dirk Schuster, two scholars of religion from the University of Potsdam, brings together thirteen case studies on the communication of religion and atheism before and after 1989 in various countries in Central and Eastern Europe. One focus of the anthology is on East Germany, the former GDR, to which five contributions are devoted. Other studies are on the Soviet Union, modern-day Russia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Croatia and Poland.

The contributions cover a very broad spectrum in terms of content and time. They deal with, for example, the beginnings of Soviet sociology of religion and with it the emergence of an anti-religious science from 1925 to 1932, religious-related vocabulary in GDR dictionaries, changes in religious knowledge in Hungary since 1945 and atheistic contributions to Catholic online forums in today's Poland. The strength of the anthology lies in its methodological approach that holds the heterogeneous contributions together: they focus on atheist, i.e. Communist or post-Communist, agents and organisations and examine how these agents and organisations created knowledge about atheism and religion in different historical and geographical contexts and how far they spread their ideologically regulated ‘truths’. Most contributions combine the approaches of the sociology of knowledge and discourse analysis. The individual contributions are all original and thoroughly researched. They are aimed primarily at religious scholars who are interested in different representations of religion in Central and Eastern Europe, but they can also be read profitably from a church-historical perspective if, for example, one wants to understand the anti-religious, scientifically based framework within which the Christian Churches in their respective countries practised their faith.