Syrian Christians Under Islam

Syrian Christians Under Islam PDF Author: David Richard Thomas
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004120556
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
These papers from the Third Woodbrooke-Mingana Symposium on "Arab Christianity in Greater Syria in the pre-Ottoman Period" portray aspects of the distinctive character developed by Arab Christianity as it endeavoured to preserve its identity while coming under influences from Islam.

Syrian Christians Under Islam

Syrian Christians Under Islam PDF Author: David Richard Thomas
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004120556
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
These papers from the Third Woodbrooke-Mingana Symposium on "Arab Christianity in Greater Syria in the pre-Ottoman Period" portray aspects of the distinctive character developed by Arab Christianity as it endeavoured to preserve its identity while coming under influences from Islam.

Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World

Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World PDF Author: Youval Rotman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674036116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Looking at the Byzantine concept of slavery within the context of law, the labour market, medieval politics, and religion, the author illustrates how these contexts both reshaped and sustained the slave market.

Evagrius and His Legacy

Evagrius and His Legacy PDF Author: Joel Kalvesmaki
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268084742
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Evagrius of Pontus (ca. 345-399) was a Greek-speaking monastic thinker and Christian theologian whose works formed the basis for much later reflection on monastic practice and thought in the Christian Near East, in Byzantium, and in the Latin West. His innovative collections of short chapters meant for meditation, scriptural commentaries in the form of scholia, extended discourses, and letters were widely translated and copied. Condemned posthumously by two ecumenical councils as a heretic along with Origen and Didymus of Alexandria, he was revered among Christians to the east of the Byzantine Empire, in Syria and Armenia, while only some of his writings endured in the Latin and Greek churches. A student of the famed bishop-theologians Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea, Evagrius left the service of the urban church and settled in an Egyptian monastic compound. His teachers were veteran monks schooled in the tradition of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Anthony, and he enriched their legacy with the experience of the desert and with insight drawn from the entire Greek philosophical tradition, from Plato and Aristotle through Iamblichus. Evagrius and His Legacy brings together essays by eminent scholars who explore selected aspects of Evagrius's life and times and address his far-flung and controversial but long-lasting influence on Latin, Byzantine, and Syriac cultures in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Touching on points relevant to theology, philosophy, history, patristics, literary studies, and manuscript studies, Evagrius and His Legacy is also intended to catalyze further study of Evagrius within as large a context as possible.

Eustratios Argenti

Eustratios Argenti PDF Author: Kallistos Ware
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 162564082X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Endorsements: This is an important contribution to the virtually non-existent history of Orthodox theology of the ""post-Patristic"" age. Mr. Ware is right in stating in his introduction that ""four centuries of Turkish rule have left -- for good or evil -- a permanent mark upon the Greek Orthodox world"" and that ""without taking into account the way Greeks thought and felt under Turkish domination, and the way their theology developed between 1453 and 1821, it is all but impossible to understand the present condition of Greek Orthodoxy."" The book begins with an extremely valuable and well-documented chapter on the general state of Orthodoxy under Islam, with a special emphasis on the relations between the Greeks and the Latins. A modern ""ecumenicist"" will discover here many puzzling facts that could help him overcome some of the current oversimplifications. Chapter 2 gives us an exhaustive biography of Argenti and in chapter 3 through 4 the main theological problems debated by Argenti -- Baptism, Eucharist, purgatory, and papacy--are presented in a clear and penetrating way. Finally, a list of Argenti's writings and a bibliography crown this scholarly book. As said above, the importance of the book goes beyond the personal case of Argenti: it helps us understand the tragedy of Eastern Orthodoxy at the time when the West was reaching the climax of its religious and cultural development. ""Squeezed"" between Latin and Protestant influences, deprived of academic centers, Orthodox theology often surrendered to pressure. Mr. Ware's point is that in the case of Argenti it avoided such a surrender and preserved its tradition from deviations and errors. -- Alexander Schmemann, St. Vladimir Seminary Quarterly 9.2 (1965) About the Contributor(s): Kallistos Ware is an English bishop within the Eastern Orthodox Church under the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and one of the best-known contemporary Eastern Orthodox theologians. From 1982 he has held the Titular Bishopric of Diokleia.

Performing the Gospels in Byzantium

Performing the Gospels in Byzantium PDF Author: Roland Betancourt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108870872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Tracing the Gospel text from script to illustration to recitation, this study looks at how illuminated manuscripts operated within ritual and architecture. Focusing on a group of richly illuminated lectionaries from the late eleventh century, the book articulates how the process of textual recitation produced marginalia and miniatures that reflected and subverted the manner in which the Gospel was read and simultaneously imagined by readers and listeners alike. This unique approach to manuscript illumination points to images that slowly unfolded in the mind of its listeners as they imagined the text being recited, as meaning carefully changed and built as the text proceeded. By examining this process within specific acoustic architectural spaces and the sonic conditions of medieval chant, the volume brings together the concerns of sound studies, liturgical studies, and art history to demonstrate how images, texts, and recitations played with the environment of the Middle Byzantine church.

Architecture and Ritual in the Churches of Constantinople

Architecture and Ritual in the Churches of Constantinople PDF Author: Vasileios Marinis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107040167
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
This book examines the interchange of architecture and ritual in the Middle and Late Byzantine churches of Constantinople (ninth to fifteenth centuries). It employs archaeological and archival data, hagiographic and historical sources, liturgical texts and commentaries, and monastic typika and testaments to integrate the architecture of the medieval churches of Constantinople with liturgical and extra-liturgical practices and their continuously evolving social and cultural context. The book argues against the approach that has dominated Byzantine studies: that of functional determinism, the view that architectural form always follows liturgical function. Instead, proceeding chapter by chapter through the spaces of the Byzantine church, it investigates how architecture responded to the exigencies of the rituals, and how church spaces eventually acquired new uses. The church building is described in the context of the culture and people whose needs it was continually adapted to serve. Rather than viewing churches as frozen in time (usually the time when the last brick was laid), this study argues that they were social constructs and so were never finished, but continually evolving.

Isaac of Nineveh's Ascetical Eschatology

Isaac of Nineveh's Ascetical Eschatology PDF Author: Jason Scully
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192525468
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Isaac of Nineveh's Ascetical Eschatology demonstrates that Isaac's eschatology is an original synthesis based on ideas garnered from a distinctively Syriac cultural milieu. Jason Scully investigates six sources relevant to the study of Isaac's Syriac source material and cultural heritage. These include ideas adapted from Syriac authors like Ephrem, John the Solitary, and Narsai, but also adapted from the Syriac versions of texts originally written in Greek, like Evagrius's Gnostic Chapters, Pseudo-Dionysius's Mystical Theology, and the Pseudo-Macarian homilies. Isaac's eschatological synthesis of this material is a sophisticated discourse on the psychological transformation that occurs when the mind has an experience of God. It begins with the premise that asceticism was part of God's original plan for creation. Isaac says that God created human beings with infantile knowledge and that God intended from the beginning for Adam and Eve to leave the Garden of Eden. Once outside the garden, human beings would have to pursue mature knowledge through bodily asceticism. Although perfect knowledge is promised in the future world, Isaac also believes that human beings can experience a proleptic taste of this future perfection. Isaac employs the concepts of wonder and astonishment in order to explain how an ecstatic experience of the future world is possible within the material structures of this world. According to Isaac, astonishment describes the moment when a person arrives at the threshold of eschatological perfection but is still unable to comprehend the heavenly mysteries, while wonder describes spiritual comprehension of heavenly knowledge through the intervention of divine grace.

Divine Scripture and Human Emotion in Maximus the Confessor

Divine Scripture and Human Emotion in Maximus the Confessor PDF Author: Andrew J. Summerson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004446559
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
In Exegesis of the Human Heart Andrew J. Summerson explores how Maximus the Confessor uses biblical interpretation to develop an account of human passibility, from fallen human passions to perfected human emotions among the divinized. This book features Maximus’s role as a creative interpreter of tradition. Maximus inherits Christian thinking on emotion, which revises Stoic and Platonic thought according to biblical categories. Through a close reading of Quaestiones ad Thalassium and a wide selection of Maximus’s works, Andrew J. Summerson shows that Maximus understands human emotion in an exegetical milieu and that Maximus places human emotion at the heart of his soteriology. Christ redeems passibility so the divinized can enjoy perfected emotional activity in the ever-moving repose of eternal life.

Liturgy in Byzantium and Beyond

Liturgy in Byzantium and Beyond PDF Author: Robert F. Taft
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040233228
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Liturgical ritual was a major element of the Christian cultures of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This was especially true of Byzantium, where court and church ritual, often intertwined, achieved a splendour unparalleled by any other aspect of civic or religious life. In this volume Robert Taft has brought together a series of studies on the formation and development of these rites and on the meaning they had for contemporaries. Particular articles look at the role of Jerusalem, Constantinople, then Mt Athos, in this process, and at the liturgy of St John Chrysostom. Also included are two important studies focusing on the role of the bema in the Syriac Church.

The Bible in Arab Christianity

The Bible in Arab Christianity PDF Author: David Richard Thomas
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004155589
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
This collection illustrates the place of the Bible in Arab Christianity as a source of authority and information about Christian experiences under early Islam, and the importance attached to upholding its authenticity in the face of Muslim criticisms.