"Let books be your dining table, / And you shall be full of delights. / Let them be your mattress,/And you shall sleep restful nights" (St. Ephraim the Syrian).
Contrary to the portrayals of Chrysostom as a theologically impaired,
moralizing sophist, this book argues that his thinking is remarkably
coherent when it is understood on his own terms and within his culture.
Chrysostom depicts God as a teacher of philosophy who adaptably guides
people toward salvation. Since the theme of divine adaptability
influences every major area of Chrysostom's thought, tracing this
concept provides a thorough introduction to his theology. It also
explains, at least in part, several striking features of his homilies,
including his supposed inconsistencies, his harsh rhetoric and apparent
political naivete, his intentionally abridged and exoteric theological
discussions, and his lack of allegiance to an "Antiochene school."
In
addition
to illuminating such topics, the concept of adaptability stands at one
of the busiest intersections of Late Antique culture, for it is an
important idea found in rhetoric and discussions about the best methods
of teaching philosophy. Consequently, adaptability is an ingredient in
the classical project of paideia, and Chrysostom is a Christian
philosopher who seeks to transform this powerful tradition of formation.
He gives his Christianized paideia a theological foundation by
adapting and seamlessly integrating traditional pedagogical methods into
his reading and communication of Scripture. David Rylaarsdam provides
an in-depth case study of one prominent leader's attempt to transform
culture by forming a coherent theological discourse that was adapted to
the level of the
masses.
In the spring issue of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies (details forthcoming), we feature an article on the role Syriac Christianity played in early missionary efforts into the Far East--China especially. Perhaps even more neglected than these efforts are Syriac writers further south in the Persian Gulf. They have been treated in a new book: Mario Kozah et al., eds., The Syriac Writers of Qatar in the Seventh Century (Gorgias Press, 2014), 300pp.
About this book we are told:
This edited volume presents a number of Syriac monastic and ascetical
writers from the seventh century who were born and educated in Beth
Qatraye (Syriac for Qatar or Region of the Qataris) of which Isaac of
Nineveh of Qatar is considered to be the most influential of all Syriac
monastic writers and who continues to exert a strong influence in
monastic circles today. Many of the others like Dadisho of Qatar,
Gabriel bar Lipeh of Qatar, Abraham bar Lipeh of Qatar, Gabriel Arya of
Qatar, and Ahob of Qatar were important Syriac writers on spirituality
and commentators or exegetes within the Church of the East tradition.
These writers, who all originated from the Qatar region and were
educated there, reveal the presence of an important school of education
that rivaled in its sophistication the other more well-known schools
such as the School of Nisibis or the School of Edessa. The Syriac
writers of Qatar themselves produced some of the best and most
sophisticated writing to be found in all Syriac literature of the
seventh century. The Syriac writers of Qatar have not received the
scholarly attention that they deserve in the last half century. This
volume seeks to redress this underdevelopment by setting the standard
for further research in the sub-field of Beth Qatraye studies. This
volume includes papers presented at an international conference held at
Qatar University in collaboration with the American University of Beirut
entitled "The Syriac Writers of Qatar in the Seventh Century." The
conference took place on 26-27 February, 2014. It was the first of its
kind in the Gulf Region, and it brought together some of the most
prominent scholars in Syriac Studies. The conference was part of a three
year research project funded by the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF)
under its National Priorities Research Program (NPRP).
It often happens in the world of academic publishing that deadlines get changed. And so even though I drew attention to this book nearly a year ago, in anticipation of a Fall 2014 publication, it seems that it will finally be in print at the end of next month. And it is a hefty tome well worth waiting for, not least for all those interested in recent Christian, especially Russian Orthodox, history, as well as those with interests in ecclesiology.
By the early twentieth century, a genuine renaissance of religious
thought and a desire for ecclesial reform were emerging in the Russian
Orthodox Church. With the end of tsarist rule and widespread
dissatisfaction with government control of all aspects of church life,
conditions were ripe for the Moscow Council of 1917-1918 to come into
being. The council was a major event in the history of the Orthodox
Church. After years of struggle for reform against political and
ecclesiastical resistance, the bishops, clergy, monastics, and laity who
formed the Moscow Council were able to listen to one other and make
sweeping decisions intended to renew the Russian Orthodox Church.
Council members sought change in every imaginable area—from seminaries
and monasteries, to parishes and schools, to the place of women in
church life and governance. Like Vatican II, the Moscow Council
emphasized the mission of the church in and to the world.
Destivelle’s study not only discusses the council and its resolutions
but also provides the historical, political, social, and cultural
context that preceded the council. In the only comprehensive and probing
account of the council, he discusses its procedures and achievements,
augmented by substantial appendices of translated conciliar documents.
Tragically, due to the Revolution, the council's decisions could not be
implemented to the extent its members hoped. Despite current trends in
the Russian church away from the Moscow Council’s vision, the council’s
accomplishments remain as models for renewal in the Eastern churches.
I just received in the mail a new book whose author I know somewhat and whom I have arranged to interview in the coming days: Peter C. Bouteneff, Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2015), 231pp. I'm excited to read this book and even more to hear from Peter, not least because I know nothing about music and have long admired people who not only understand music but can also play it, a skill I still hope to develop some day. (I take consolation from the fact that my late paternal grandmother had a cousin who, at the age of 80, decided one day she too wanted to learn how to play piano, and set about doing precisely that. She then spent most of the next decade or so of her life driving around southern Ontario to play music "for the old folks" in nursing homes!)
About this book the publisher tells us:
Listeners often speak of a certain mystery in the way that Arvo Pärt
evokes spirituality through his music, but no one has taken a sustained,
close look at how he achieves this. Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence examines
the powerful interplay between Pärt s music and the composer s own deep
roots in the Orthodox Christian faith a relationship that has born much
creative fruit and won the hearts of countless listeners across the
globe.
Liturgical Subjects examines the
history of the self in the Byzantine Empire, challenging narratives of
Christian subjectivity that focus only on classical antiquity and the
Western Middle Ages. As Derek Krueger demonstrates, Orthodox Christian
interior life was profoundly shaped by patterns of worship introduced
and disseminated by Byzantine clergy. Hymns, prayers, and sermons
transmitted complex emotional responses to biblical stories,
particularly during Lent. Religious services and religious art taught
congregants who they were in relation to God and each other.
Focusing
on Christian practice in Constantinople from the sixth to eleventh
centuries, Krueger charts the impact of the liturgical calendar, the
eucharistic rite, hymns for vigils and festivals, and scenes from the
life of Christ on the making of Christian selves. Exploring the verse of
great Byzantine liturgical poets, including Romanos the Melodist,
Andrew of Crete, Theodore the Stoudite, and Symeon the New Theologian,
he demonstrates how their compositions offered templates for Christian
self-regard and self-criticism, defining the Christian "I." Cantors,
choirs, and congregations sang in the first person singular expressing
guilt and repentence, while prayers and sermons defined the collective
identity of the Christian community as sinners in need of salvation. By
examining the way models of selfhood were formed, performed, and
transmitted in the Byzantine Empire, Liturgical Subjects adds a vital dimension to the history of the self in Western culture.
I recently discussed the Armenian Genocide in my class on Eastern Christian encounters with Islam. And lo and behold the very next week Pope Francis acknowledged what every other sane and serious person on the planet knows, viz., that it was an organized, systematic slaughter of the Armenians both qua Armenians and also as Christians: thus a genocide. The Turkish government, of course, did not cover themselves in glory in their response to the pope, a response as risible as that given by the Turkish MP interviewed in this documentary (at 16:31), which I showed to my students:
As I have noted on here several times over the last two years, 2014 marked the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, and now in April 2015 we are marking the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. (The New Yorker has a long and fascinating article on the genocide, which you may read here.)
Numerous books have recently been published--discussed below--and several more are set for release later this year, including Alan Whitehorn's The Armenian Genocide: A Century of Remembrance and Denial (Praeger, 2015), 325pp. About this book we are told by the publisher:
A century after the devastating mass killing of the Ottoman Armenians
during the Armenian Genocide—considered one of the first genocides of
the 20th century—this catastrophe continues to raise important and
troubling issues, particularly given the Turkish state's ongoing denial.
Indeed, much of the continuing instability and conflict in the Caucasus
is rooted in the Armenian Genocide. Drawing upon diverse academic
disciplines and written by a single author who is a leading expert on
the subject, The Armenian Genocide: A Century of Remembrance and Denial
explores the profound short- and long-term impacts of the 1915 Armenian
Genocide. The chapters document how this genocide created a scattered
and traumatized Armenian Diaspora and imposed major stresses upon the
tiny and vulnerable landlocked Armenian state. The book addresses
difficult topics such as the challenge of the "double death" of the
victims as a result of the ongoing Turkish state denial. This volume
provides an analysis of the Armenian Genocide from several analytical
perspectives, thereby giving readers a more comprehensive understanding
of this enormously important subject.
About the Armenian genocide--accompanied by an equally devastating, though far less well known, simultaneous slaughter of Pontic Greeks and Assyrian Christians, and later Aegean Greek Christians also--we have seen a number of recent books, and later in 2015 will see several more. (For those desirous of some background at the conceptual and biographical level of "genocide" and the terms origins in the work of Raphael Lemkin, see here.)
The most controversial question that is still being asked about the
First World War - was there an Armenian genocide? - will come to a head
on 24 April 2015, when Armenians worldwide will commemorate its
centenary and Turkey will deny that it took place, claiming that the
deaths of over half of the Armenian race were justified. This has
become a vital international issue. Twenty national parliaments in
democratic countries have voted to recognise the genocide, but Britain
and the USA continue to equivocate for fear of alienating their NATO
ally. Geoffrey Robertson QC condemns this hypocrisy, and in An
Inconvenient Genocide he proves beyond reasonable doubt that the
horrific events in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 constitute the crime
against humanity that is today known as genocide. He explains how
democracies can deal with genocide denial without infringing free
speech, and makes a major contribution to understanding and preventing
this worst of all crimes. His renowned powers of advocacy are on full
display as he condemns all those - from Sri Lanka to the Sudan, from Old
Anatolia to modern Syria and Iraq - who try to justify the mass murder
of children and civilians in the name of military necessity or religious
fervour.
While much of the international community regards the forced deportation
of Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, where approximately
800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians perished, as genocide, the Turkish
state still officially denies it.
In Denial of Violence,
Fatma Müge Göçek seeks to decipher the roots of this disavowal. To
capture the negotiation of meaning that leads to denial, Göçek undertook
a qualitative analysis of 315 memoirs published in Turkey from 1789 to
2009 in addition to numerous secondary sources, journals, and
newspapers. She argues that denial is a multi-layered, historical
process with four distinct yet overlapping components: the structural
elements of collective violence and situated modernity on one side, and
the emotional elements of collective emotions and legitimating events on
the other. In the Turkish case, denial emerged through four stages: (i)
the initial imperial denial of the origins of the collective violence
committed against the Armenians commenced in 1789 and continued until
1907; (ii) the Young Turk denial of the act of violence lasted for a
decade from 1908 to 1918; (iii) early republican denial of the actors of
violence took place from 1919 to 1973; and (iv) the late republican
denial of the responsibility for the collective violence started in 1974
and continues today.
Denial of Violence develops a
novel theoretical, historical and methodological framework to
understanding what happened and why the denial of collective violence
against Armenians still persists within Turkish state and society.
Then in December we saw published a work by Thomas de Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide (Oxford UP, 2014), 312pp. (This links to the Kindle version. The hardback is forthcoming in February.) About this book we are told:
The destruction of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16 was
the greatest atrocity of World War I. Around one million Armenians were
killed, and the survivors were scattered across the world. Although it
is now a century old, the issue of what most of the world calls the
Armenian Genocide of 1915 is still a live and divisive issue that
mobilizes Armenians across the world, shapes the identity and politics
of modern Turkey, and has consumed the attention of U.S. politicians for
years.
In Great Catastrophe, the eminent scholar and
reporter Thomas de Waal looks at the aftermath and politics of the
Armenian Genocide and tells the story of recent efforts by courageous
Armenians, Kurds, and Turks to come to terms with the disaster as Turkey
enters a new post-Kemalist era. The story of what happened to the
Armenians in 1915-16 is well-known. Here we are told the "history of the
history" and the lesser-known story of what happened to Armenians,
Kurds, and Turks in the century that followed. De Waal relates how
different generations tackled the issue of the "Great Catastrophe" from
the 1920s until the failure of the Protocols signed by independent
Armenia and Turkey in 2010. Quarrels between diaspora Armenians
supporting and opposing the Soviet Union broke into violence and
culminated with the murder of an archbishop in 1933. The devising of the
word "genocide," the growth of modern identity politics, and the 50th
anniversary of the massacres re-energized a new generation of Armenians.
In Turkey the issue was initially forgotten, only to return to the
political agenda in the context of the Cold War and an outbreak of
Armenian terrorism. More recently, Turkey has started to confront its
taboos. In an astonishing revival of oral history, the descendants of
tens of thousands of "Islamized Armenians," who have been in the shadows
since 1915, have begun to reemerge and reclaim their identities.
Drawing
on archival sources, reportage and moving personal stories, de Waal
tells the full story of Armenian-Turkish relations since the Genocide in
all its extraordinary twists and turns. He looks behind the propaganda
to examine the realities of a terrible historical crime and the divisive
"politics of genocide" it produced. The book throws light not only on
our understanding of Armenian-Turkish relations but also of how mass
atrocities and historical tragedies shape contemporary politics.
Sacred Justice is a cross-genre book
that uses narrative, memoir, unpublished letters, and other primary and
secondary sources to tell the story of a group of Armenian men who
organized Operation Nemesis, a covert operation created to assassinate
the Turkish architects of the Armenian Genocide. The leaders of
Operation Nemesis took it upon themselves to seek justice for their
murdered families, friends, and compatriots.
This book includes a
large collection of previously unpublished letters that show the
strategies, personalities, plans, and dedication of Soghomon Tehlirian,
who killed Talaat Pasha, a genocide leader; Shahan Natalie, the agent on
the ground in Europe; Armen Garo, the center of Operation Nemesis;
Aaron Sachaklian, the logistics and finance officer; and others involved
with Nemesis.
The author tells a story that has been either
hidden by the necessity of silence or ignored in spite of victims’
narratives. This is the story of those who attempted to seek justice for
the victims and the effect this effort had on them and on their
families. The book shows how the narratives of resistance and trauma can
play out in the next generation and how resistance can promote
resilience. Little has been written about Operation Nemesis. As we
approach the centennial anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, it is
time.
The Armenian Genocide has often been
considered a template for subsequent genocides and is one of the first
genocides of the 20th century. As such, it holds crucial historical
significance, and it is critically important that today's students
understand this case study of inhumanity. This book provides a
much-needed, long-overdue reference volume on the Armenian Genocide. It
begins with seven introductory analytical essays that provide a broad
overview of the Armenian Genocide and then presents individual entries, a
historical timeline, and a selection of documents.
This
essential reference work covers all aspects of the Armenian Genocide,
including the causes, phases, and consequences. It explores political
and historical perspectives as well as the cultural aspects. The
carefully selected collection of perspective essays will inspire
critical thinking and provide readers with insight into some of the most
controversial and significant issues of the Armenian Genocide.
Similarly, the primary source documents are prefaced by thoughtful
introductions that will provide the necessary context to help students
understand the significance of the material.
Armenian Aram Haigaz was only 15 when he lost his father, brothers, many
relatives and neighbors, all killed or dead of starvation when enemy
soldiers surrounded their village. He and his mother were put into a
forced march and deportation of Armenians into the Turkish desert, part
of the systematic destruction of the largely Christian Armenian
population in 1915 by the Ottoman Empire. His mother urged Aram to
convert to Islam in order to survive, and on the fourth day of the
march, a Turk agreed to take this young convert into his household. Aram
spent four long years living as a slave, servant and shepherd among
Kurdish tribes, slowly gaining his captors’ trust. He grew from a boy to
a man in these years and his narrative offers readers a remarkable
coming of age story as well as a valuable eyewitness to history. Haigaz
was able to escape to the United States in 1921.
There are, I know, further books in the works so stay tuned on here for details of some of them.
The book examines deep shifts in the religious life of Russia
and the post-Soviet world as a whole. The author uses combined methods
of history, sociology and anthropology to grasp transformations in
various aspects of the religious field, such as changes in ritual
practices, the emergence of a hierarchical pluralism of religions, and a
new prominence of religion in national identity discourse. He deals
with the Russian Church’s new internal diversity in reinventing its
ancient tradition and Eastern Orthodoxy’s dense and tense negotiation
with the State, secular society and Western liberal globalism. The
volume contains academic papers, some of them co-authored with other
scholars, published by the author elsewhere within the last fifteen
years.
Contents: Russian Orthodox Church – Eastern Christianity –
National identity – Religious practices – Religion and human rights –
Church-State relations – Post-Soviet religiosity – Globalization,
religious pluralism – Traditional and liberal values. Further details may be had here.
In my survey class on Eastern Christian encounters with Islam, I make a point of looking at Russia in some depth--though usually only from 1917 onward--because the encounters between Orthodox Christians and Muslims throughout the former USSR and in the current Russian Federation are of course very different from the encounters in such places as Armenia, Turkey, Syria, and Egypt. Now we have a new book to look at the pre-Soviet imperial period and the fate of non-Orthodox within the tsarist empire: Paul Werth, The Tsar's Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (Oxford UP, 2014), 304pp.
About this book we are told:
The Russian Empire presented itself to its subjects and the world as an Orthodox state, a patron and defender of Eastern Christianity. Yet the tsarist regime also lauded itself for granting religious freedoms to its many heterodox subjects, making 'religious toleration' a core attribute of the state's identity. The Tsar's Foreign Faiths shows that the resulting tensions between the autocracy's commitments to Orthodoxy and its claims to toleration became a defining feature of the empire's religious order.
In this panoramic account, Paul W. Werth explores the scope and character of religious freedom for Russia's diverse non-Orthodox religions, from Lutheranism and Catholicism to Islam and Buddhism. Considering both rhetoric and practice, he examines discourses of religious toleration and the role of confessional institutions in the empire's governance. He reveals the paradoxical status of Russia's heterodox faiths as both established and 'foreign', and explains the dynamics that shaped the fate of newer conceptions of religious liberty after the mid-nineteenth century. If intellectual change and the shifting character of religious life in Russia gradually pushed the regime towards the acceptance of freedom of conscience, then statesmen's nationalist sentiments and their fears of 'politicized' religion impeded this development. Russia's religious order thus remained beset by contradiction on the eve of the Great War. Based on archival research in five countries and a vast scholarly literature, The Tsar's Foreign Faiths represents a major contribution to the history of empire and religion in Russia, and to the study of toleration and religious diversity in Europe.
One of the interesting developments in the last three decades has been that of evangelicals "discovering" the Christian East. There are a number of books--of varying quality, accuracy, and therefore reliability--from evangelicals documenting these discoveries, including James R. Payton's Light from the Christian East: An Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition, which I reviewed elsewhere (largely favorably) several years ago.
Now a new book comes along, asking how "Bible-believing" Christians are to read and understand competing truth-claims in the Quran. And the author, quite sensibly, realizes that in a book being published in 2015, evangelical Christians should not be beginning from scratch when it comes to Quaranic exegesis and dealing with competing claims. Rather, there is a 1400-year history of Eastern Christians engaging Islam, and that history and those engagements remain hugely valuable today: J. Scott Bridger, Christian Exegesis of the Qur'an: A Critical Analysis of the Apologetic Use of the Qur'an in Select Medieval and Contemporary Arabic Texts (Pickwick, 2015), 200pp.
About this book we are told:
Can Christians read biblical meaning into quranic texts? Does this
violate the intent of those passages? What about making positive
reference to the Quran in the context of an evangelistic presentation or
defense of biblical doctrines? Does this imply that Christians accept
the Muslim scripture as inspired? What about Christians who reside in
the world of Islam and write their theology in the language of the
Quran-Arabic? Is it legitimate for them to use the Quran in their
explanations of the Christian faith? This book explores these questions
and offers a biblically, theologically, and historically informed
response. For years evangelical Christians seeking answers to questions
like these have turned to the history of Protestant Christian
interaction with Muslim peoples. Few are aware of the cultural,
intellectual, and theological achievements of Middle Eastern Christians
who have resided in the world of Islam for fourteen centuries. Their
works are a treasure-trove of riches for those investigating
contemporary theological and missiological questions such as the
apologetic use of the Quran.
Two years ago now I reviewed an utterly fascinating book about Christians and Muslims in Anatolia. I am thus looking forward to another book on the topic to be released later this month: A.C.S. Peacock et al, eds., Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia (Ashgate, 2015), 444pp.
About this book we are told:
Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia offers a comparative
approach to understanding the spread of Islam and Muslim culture in
medieval Anatolia. It aims to reassess work in the field since the 1971
classic by Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Hellenism in Asia Minor and
the Process of Islamization which treats the process of transformation
from a Byzantinist perspective. Since then, research has offered
insights into individual aspects of Christian-Muslim relations, but no
overview has appeared. Moreover, very few scholars of Islamic studies
have examined the problem, meaning evidence in Arabic, Persian and
Turkish has been somewhat neglected at the expense of Christian sources,
and too little attention has been given to material culture. The essays
in this volume examine the interaction between Christianity and Islam
in medieval Anatolia through three distinct angles, opening with a
substantial introduction by the editors to explain both the research
background and the historical problem, making the work accessible to
scholars from other fields. The first group of essays examines the
Christian experience of living under Muslim rule, comparing their
experiences in several of the major Islamic states of Anatolia between
the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, especially the Seljuks and the
Ottomans. The second set of essays examines encounters between
Christianity and Islam in art and intellectual life. They highlight the
ways in which some traditions were shared across confessional divides,
suggesting the existence of a common artistic and hence cultural
vocabulary. The final section focusses on the process of Islamisation,
above all as seen from the Arabic, Persian and Turkish textual evidence
with special attention to the role of Sufism.
Who are the Assyrians and what role did they play in shaping modern
Iraq? Were they simply bystanders, victims of collateral damage who
played a passive role in the history of Iraq? Furthermore, how have they
negotiated their position throughout various periods of Iraq's
state-building processes? This book details a narrative of Iraq in the
twentieth century and refashions the Assyrian experience as an integral
part of Iraq's broader contemporary historiography. It is the first
comprehensive account to contextualise a native experience alongside the
emerging state. Using primary and secondary data, this book offers a
nuanced exploration of the dynamics that have affected and determined
the trajectory of the Assyrians' experience in twentieth century Iraq.
