Religious involvement in public sphere in a secular state: institutions,interests and attitudes

The article focuses on the relations between religious institutions and state in a secular environment. The example for the secular environment has been taken from Estonia that is considered a highly secularized society, and Estonia is by its constitution is a secular state. The article, however, argues that even in a secularized society and in secular state religiously motivated lobby may influence political decision-making processes if the aims of the religious lobby manage to hide its overly religious agenda and present it in the context of ethno-cultural heritage. The example of this approach is taken from the activities of an indigenous neopagan religious association that has been lobbying for the protection of sacred landscapes or natural sacred sites in Estonia which sounds with the general societal approach on nature protection. At the same time new issues concerning the protection of holiness in natural environment have emerged.     

Estimation of Periodic Bilinear Time Series Models

In this article, a new class of models is proposed for modeling nonlinear and nonstationary time series. This new class of models, referred to as the periodic bilinear models, has a state space representation and can be characterized by a set of recursive equations. Condition for the stationarity is presented. Procedures for parameter estimation using the cumulants of order less than four are described and the accuracy of the proposed method is demonstrated in the Monte Carlo simulations.