MAP Education and Humanities

When Faith Becomes Ancestry

Adis Maksic — 2026-04-03

This article examines how religious institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina transform faith into ethnonational belonging by linking religion with ancestry. Focusing on the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Islamic Community between 2015 and 2025, it argues that institutional religious discourse reframes religious identity as inherited rather than chosen. Drawing on constructivist and post-structuralist approaches, the study conceptualizes descent not as biological fact but as a narrative effect produced through language, symbolism, and repetition. Through comparative discourse analysis of sermons, epistles, and public statements, the article identifies three mechanisms: the construction of the community as a transgenerational moral organism, the sacralization of territory as inherited space, and the mobilization of narratives of suffering and martyrdom that bind present generations to ancestral obligation. These strategies naturalize ethnonational boundaries by embedding them in morally authoritative and emotionally resonant frameworks, making alternative forms of belonging more difficult to sustain. By foregrounding the role of religious institutions in the ethnicization of identity, the article contributes to debates on nationalism, religion, and the durability of ethnopolitical divisions in post-conflict societies

An SFG-Based Metafunctional Analysis of High School English Lesson Plans and the Gap in Functional Knowledge

Adnan Bujak — 2026-04-20

It is believed that teachers in secondary education prioritise correctness in grammar instruction and, in doing so, often overlook the functional potential of language, which is used to negotiate social meaning. The paper aims to investigate the language instruction gap in high school general English language classes by examining the extent to which lesson plans incorporate Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) as a resource for meaning-making (Schleppegrell, 2017). The analysis in this paper applies Halliday’s (1994) metafunctional framework and Nunan’s (1995) analytical outline in order to investigate a corpus of ten lesson plans and their corresponding materials through a qualitative coding scheme. The findings reveal that the main instructions remain dominated by prescriptive rules that treat language as a static object. The analysis indicates that, despite learner-centred classroom management, the interpersonal resources of Mood and Modality remain teacher-controlled, limiting learners’ ability to actively participate in the meaning-making process. The paper concludes that SFG can contribute to bridging the instruction gap by transforming grammar from a set of restrictive rules into a dynamic, functional resource for successful communication.