The present paper dwells on the modern phenomenon of the clergy going online and exploring new audiences. The empirical study conducted by the author concerned the activities of popular Russian-speaking Orthodox bloggers whose heightening media presence is aimed at digital missionary work and catechism. The research was organized in accordance with the theoretical framework of the concept of communicative figurations that was coined by Andreas Hepp. This constructivist approach implies that mediatization blurs the borders between previously disentangled actors and encourages the growth of their interactions and, thus, a tighter social reality. To embody a communi-cative figurations-oriented study, the author lays down methodological foundations that are able to express the nature of personal practices and the reflections on them. For this purpose, the methods used consisted of case studies, expert and field interviews, and online text analysis. The findings can be set out in the following manner. Online media activity and social networking allow greater transparency and a wider audience. Despite stereotype and politicized doxa, the online demand for a specific niche of purely catechetic Orthodox priest blogging has existed for a decade and a half. Over the years, media practices of missionary work, catechism, and preaching have been formed, mainly on such social networks as VK.com, LiveJournal and Instagram, and on YouTube channels. This dynamic has been growing: priest blogs have acquired the audiences of tens of thousands of subscribers. This is because priests use contemporary language when addressing the public for the purpose of missionary work and catechism. They attract an audience of the Russian-speaking network of actors that is diverse in age, gender, and country of residence. Seeing and aiming beyond the conservative confines of an offline parish and church, blogging priests have the opportunity to create their own audience – to reach out to a particular generation, choose the style and content of a sermon or testimony of faith. In turn, the audiences choose priest bloggers according to their interests and the preferred methods of religious participation. Orthodox blogger priests strive to consolidate their efforts, to promote various forms of testimony of faith in the digital space. The central direct consequence of the mediatization of catechism and missionary practices is the promotion of a new image of the priest and a new version of priest–layman interaction, both contributing to a new church construct.

The present article analyses the approach of Georges Florovsky to the problem of the secular (worldly, earthly, immanent). Georges Florovsky gave the secular tendencies in the Christian world a negative assessment as they led to cultural crises. He proposed to seek their origin in the antinomic (God–human, both earthly and heavenly) nature of the Christian church. He deduced that the origins of secular culture stemmed forth from the medieval attempts to break this antinomy, to create Heaven on Earth. This could be seen in the Byzantine Empire (the subordination of the Church to the Emperor), in the Latin world (the assignment of secular power to the Pope), in the European post-Reformation thought (through the blurring of the distinction between theology and de-Christianized philosophy), and later in the Russian religious philosophy (attempts to formulate the idea of Christian state). Drawing on the concept of the divine-human antinomy of the Church, Georges Florovsky insisted that the Church should neither try to blur the line between the religious and the secular, nor attempt to influence secular politics, but should instead proceed from the fact that culture is intrinsically religious and substantially theologized. In fact, he objected to the ecclesiasticization of politics and offered to proceed from the assumption that Christianity (religion) is universal by default. Florovsky used a dual, dialectical approach in which secular discourse is seen as a religious discourse that aspires to secular power and consequently ceases to be religious, creating a kind of secular culture that threatens Christianity itself. In order to overcome this secular culture, Christianity is called upon to abstain from direct political influence on it. While avoiding limitations of the religious–secular du-alism of the Enlightenment and allowing the Church thought to prevent aggravating relations with secular politics, this approach fails to properly distinguish between the causes and the effects of secular discourse. The conclusion identifies ways of furthering Florovsky's approach and thought.

The present article provides a sociocultural analysis of parameters of the millennials, the generation which will become the main workforce in Russia in the next ten years. This is what gives the paper its relevance. The paper focuses on the market and micro-interactionist influence of basic traits of millennials. The issue of how to behave towards millennials is faced both at the sociological and managerial levels. It is said that the large number of conflicts between millennials and older generations leads to systematic disruption and turbulence, as it does not allow young employees to integrate into corporate cultures and increase labour efficiency, which simultaneously affects older employees, management and corporative performance. Another aspect of the core issue raised by the author is educating the youth. Understanding the set of core values of millennials, their strategies and behavioural tactics in the workplace is also a prerequisite for teachers and instructors to successfully train students of this generation in universities. Like many recent studies, this research considers the distinctive features that can be used to characterize millennials. They, being digital natives, shift to more rapid, discrete and depersonalized forms of communication. Focused on managing their personal image and identity, millennials prefer to play socially desirable roles and tend to reframe their own failures into external misfortunes. This brings about the issue of meeting set goals, and nowadays the youth tends to plan less and thrives on regular feedback that they expect to be positive. These features are most likely to breed intergenerational misunderstanding. However, millennials tend to be more flexible and tolerant than other generations, which is useful for settling controversies and speaks to the overall success of interaction and effort on the part of this generation. The author, addressing the challenges of communication with the modern youth, offers recommendations based on her own pedagogical experience of interaction with millennials. These are: provide basic guidelines, time plans, and assessment benchmarks. Managerial staff should also dedicate more effort to mentorship and peer-level communication.

The significance of the study of philosophic aspects of building a new game universe in an RPG (role-playing game) stems from the popularity of this type of virtual reality entertainment. The paper gives an analysis of the anti-world, a key concept of role-playing gaming, based on The Witcher video game series. The game is founded on an original series of works under the same title created by Polish fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowski. The case under consideration serves as a good example for looking into the patterns of forming the space of the game universe that can be equally regarded as a moment when a cultural landscape of virtual en-tertainment is formed. In this case, RPG can be considered as a socio-cultural practice of the global information society and/or one of the variants of the performance society. The methodological basis of the study is comparative analysis, which implies the identification of borrowings in the process of developing a culture of virtual entertainment and requires learning about basic cultural codes and archetypal designs that are specific to RPG. As a result of the research, the specificity of the new imagery form inherent in the game universe of The Witcher was revealed. The cultural landscape created in the game includes elements of the medieval laughter culture integrated into the unique system of dynamic images and meanings, constantly evolving and functioning in a way analogous with the established cultural and symbolic reality. The effect of the double symbolic analogy is determined by the creative nature of the game, in which players, in addition to participating in the gaming process, also contribute to the creation of the game. The introduction of game images into the language and thinking of the players causes the emergence of new forms of dialects, fixing the peculiarities of perception by the group (sociolect) and the individual (idiolect) of both primary and secondary reality. These dialects are geographically localized and at the same time multicultural. The article substantiates the conclusion that the instrumentalization of the performance society occurs due to the active use of grotesque symbolism, which, due to its archetypal nature, ensures the formation of a new social mythology that enables the discovery of Eastern Europe by the rest of the world. Thus, the anti-world of the new universe turns into an integral part of the modern information space.

This article considers a specific type of headline that is common in modern mass media discourse, namely clickbait. The novelty of the research is in the object of study and the material represented in three languages – Russian, English and French. Clickbait as a phenomenon has not been investigated before, nor has its national and cultural specificity in the three analysed linguistic cultures; this fact determines the relevance of the study. The analysis of the language material was based on the hypothetical-deductive method, the continuous sampling method, and on stylistic and contextual analysis. The purpose of this work is to identify the content and stylistic characteristics of clickbait in the Russian -, English- and French-speaking information space. Initially, the English-language lexeme “clickbait” was borrowed into Russian and French, where it received additional nominations. In the Russian language, this word is almost assimilated as a language unit. The authors believe that clickbait is a type of a manipulative influence exerted on the mass audience, the essence of which is to attract and retain the recipient’s attention using false or dubious information. To this end, a variety of language and audio-visual tools are used that allow us to assign clickbait to a creolized text type. The authors believe that clickbait is a global phenomenon in the modern information space, whose national and cultural specificity is determined by a national “agenda.” The article is addressed to philologists, psychologists and sociologists. The research results may also be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate students specializing in the Humanities.