The research of Senior Research Fellow II Dr. Nonka Bogomilova places key elements from the spiritual and socio-political sphere of democratizing contemporary societies under the "lens" of the category of vitality: philosophy, religion, political myth-making, political-economic strategies, and alternatives in the context of globalization. Some forms of social resistance to vitality and renewal are analyzed and critically examined: the historical mythologization of "the self," "the authentic" versus "the foreign," the cosmopolitan; religious "revival" in synthesis with the ethnic and political; the formation of renewed institutions without a synchronous process of value-psychological renewal through education and culture.