The Maronites

This recent and interesting article on the desire of the Maronites to revive and retain the use of Aramaic puts me in mind of a fascinating paper I heard by a Spanish scholar at ASMEA in Washington last month entitled "The Arabic Karšuni: an Attempt to Preserve the Maronite Identity in Aleppo, Syria." I am also reminded of  a recent study of them by Paul Naaman: The Maronites: The Origins of an Antiochene Church: A Historical and Geographical Study of the Fifth to Seventh Centuries (Cistercian, 2011). This book is also available in a Kindle edition.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The Maronite Church is one of twenty-two Eastern Catholic Churches in communion with the Pope of Rome. Her patriarch is in Lebanon. Forty-three bishops and approximately five million faithful make up her presence throughout the world. The story of Maron, a fifth-century hermit-priest, and the community gathered around him, later called the Maronites, tells another fascinating story of the monastic and missionary movements of the Church. Maron's story takes place in the context of Syrian monasticism, which was a combination of both solitary and communal life, and is a narrative of Christians of the Middle East as they navigated the rough seas of political divisions and ecclesiastical controversies from the fourth to the ninth centuries. Abbot Paul Naaman wisely places the study of the origins of the Maronite Church squarely in the midst of the history of the Church. His book offers plausible insights into her formation and early development, grounding the Maronite Church in her Catholic, Antiochian, Syriac, and monastic roots.