Syriac Hagiography

A little over six years ago I interviewed a young scholar of Syriac Christianity. You may read that interview here. Since then, we have seen additional works emerge on the Syriac tradition as a whole, as well as such topics as hagiography, ecclesial architecture, and relations with Islam. 

We have a recent book that forms the twentieth volume of Brill's series Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity. A scholarly collection, edited by Sergey Minov and Flavia Ruani, the volume is Syriac Hagiography: Texts and Beyond (Brill, 2021), 382pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this: 

Chapters gathered in Syriac Hagiography: Texts and Beyond explore a wide range of Syriac hagiographical works, while following two complementary methodological approaches, i.e. literary and cultic, or formal and functional. Grouped into three main sections, these contributions reflect three interrelated ways in which we can read Syriac hagiography and further grasp its characteristics: “Texts as Literature” seeks to unfold the mechanisms of their literary composition; “Saints Textualized” offers a different perspective on the role played by hagiographical texts in the invention and/or maintenance of the cult of a particular saint or group of saints; “Beyond the Texts” presents cases in which the historical reality behind the nexus of hagiographical texts and veneration of saints can be observed in greater details.

Daily Holiness and Ordinary Saints

The newly released exhortation from Pope Francis, Gaudete et exsultate, almost from its opening lines put me immediately in mind of the themes that my friend, the Orthodox scholar Michael Plekon, has so often pursued in many of his recent books. He recently retired after teaching for more than forty years at the City University of New York; but he never told me he was going to use his spare time to take up ghost writing for the pope! The parallels are, as our father among the saints Sigmund of Vienna might say, uncanny.

See, in particular, Plekon's Saints as They Really Are, about which I interviewed him here.

And Hidden Holiness also anticipates in striking ways many of these new papal themes.

Michael's most recent book, The World as Sacrament: an Ecumenical Path toward a Worldly Spirituality, was released just over a year ago, and I interviewed him about that book here.

In the fall of 2016 he published Uncommon Prayer: Prayer in Everyday Experience. My interview with him about this book is here.

He is also the author and editor of other books, any one of which will be worth your time and repay re-reading over the years. And he has been feted in this Festschrift, noted here. 

I may post further thoughts on this new papal document next week. I see (e.g. paragraph 96: "Holiness, then, is not about swooning in mystic rapture") already some other striking parallels to Maggie Ross, whom I discussed at length here and here. I'm sure there will be others.