A short walk from the glistening Nile nestled in a dusty Cairo street lies the Coptic Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, known locally as the Boutrosiya. If one were to enter through one of the seven doors, walk down the columned central aisle past Venetian mosaics and silk curtains, they would find the tomb of Boutros Pasha Ghali. Resting on two steps of black marble, decorated with colourful crosses, are written his last words: 'God knows that I never did anything that harmed my country'. The first Copt to be awarded the title of Pasha, the career of Boutros Pasha Ghali inextricably linked his family's fate to that of Egypt. From early whispers of independence to the last Mubarak government and the United Nations, the Boutros-Ghali's have not only been a force in the political, cultural and religious life of Egypt, but internationally. This book traces the illustrious history of this family from 1864 to the present day. Through assassinations, wars and elections, it illuminates the events that have shaped Egyptian and Coptic life, revealing the family's crucial role in the creation of modern Egypt and what their legacy may mean for the future of their country.

Recent archaeological discoveries within the Upper Tigris region in Southeastern Turkey offer a unique opportunity to understand the dynamics of the Assyrian Empire borderlands. Within a few years most of the region will be irreversibly submerged, due to the construction of the Ilisu dam, the biggest hydroelectric power plant project in Turkey. It is of paramount importance to understand and record as much data as possible about the local communities and the foreign connections that flowered in this area.

The standard edition of the Curetonian manuscript, with the Sinai text in the footnotes. One volume contains the Syriac text with facing English translation; the other contains a discussion of the Old Syriac version.

A collection of studies on the Syriac sixth century writer Jacob of Sarug by a team of international scholars, including Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Sebastian P. Brock, Sharbil Iskandar Bcheiry, Khalid Dinno, Sidney Griffith, Mary Hansbury, Amir Harrak, George A. Kiraz, Edward Matthews, Aho Shemunkasho, and Lucas Van Rompay.

From diverse international and multi-disciplinary perspectives, the contributors to this volume analyze the experiences, challenges and responses of Orthodox churches to the foundational transformations associated with the dissolution of the USSR. Those transformations heightened the urgency of questions about Orthodox identity and relations with the world - states, societies, and the religious and cultural other.
The volume focuses on six distinct concepts: Orthodox identity, perceptions of the 'other, ' critiques of the West, European values, interreligious progress, and new and uncharted challenges that have arisen with the expansion of Russian Orthodox activity.

The meditative prayer practices known as Hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer have played an important role in the history of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. This book explores how these prayer practices have spread from a primarily monastic setting within Orthodox Christianity, into general Orthodox Christian usage, and finally into wider contemporary Western culture. As a result of this gradual geographic shift from a local to a global setting, caused mainly by immigration and dissemination of related texts, there has been a parallel shift of interpretation causing disagreement. By analyzing ongoing conversations on the practices, this book shows how such disagreements are due to differences in the way groups understand the ideas of authority and tradition. These fundamental ideas lie beneath much of the current discussion on particular aspects of the practices and also contribute to the wider academic debate over the globalization and appropriation of religious traditions.

Jacob of Sarug (451-521) was a prolific writer of the Syriac Church and was known as "the flute of the Holy Spirit and the harp of the believing church". Sebastian Brock gives the Syriac edition of six homilies written by Jacob: on the birth of our Lord; on the baptism of our Lord; on the Great Lent; on Palm Sunday; on Good Friday; on Easter Sunday. The text is based on an ancient manuscripts preserved in London and dated 609.

Am Beispiel der Initiationssakramente (Taufe, Firmung, Eucharistiefeier) und der Priesterweihe wird einerseits die Konsekration der Materie (Wasser, Myronoel, Brot und Wein) und des Empfangers dargestellt, anderseits das Konsekrationsgeschehen der einzelnen liturgischen Vollzuge nach der syrisch antiochenischen Liturgie miteinander verglichen, analysiert und kommentiert.

Severus of Antioch is by far the most prolific and well known theologian of the non-Chalcedonian churches. Although his life and writings came to our knowledge in Syriac, gaining him the title "Crown of the Syriac Literature," many texts relating to his life and works survived in the Coptic and Copto-Arabic tradition, as well as a number of other texts that were traditionally attributed to him. This book provides an analysis of these texts as well as a discussion of the veneration of Severus of Antioch in the Coptic Church.

Patriarch Nikon, the most energetic, creative, influential, and obstinate of Russia's early religious leaders, dominates this book. As Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Nikon's most important initiative was to bring Russian religious rituals into line with Greek Orthodox tradition, from which Russia's practices had diverted. Kiev's Monastery of the Caves served as a medium for his transmission of Greek notions. Nikon and Tsar Alexis I (r. 1645-1676) envisioned Russia's transformed into a new Holy Land. Eventually, Nikon became a challenger for Imperial authority. While his reforms endure, failed policies and poor political judgment were decisive in his fall and in the Patriarchate's reduction in status. Ultimately, the reforms of Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725) led to its replacement by a new, government-controlled body, the Holy Synod, which nevertheless carried out a continuity of Nikon's policies. This exceptional volume contextualizes Nikon's Patriarchate as part of the broader continuities in Russian History and serves as a bridge to the present, where Russia is forging new relationships between Church and power.

This is the standard edition of the chronicle of Bar Hebraeus in Syriac and English translation. It gives the political history of the world from the creation to the year AD 1286.

There are saints in Orthodox Christian culture who overturn the conventional concept of sainthood. Their conduct may be unruly and salacious, they may blaspheme and even kill - yet, mysteriously, those around them treat them with even more reverence. Such saints are called 'holy fools'. In this pioneering study Sergey A. Ivanov examines the phenomenon of holy foolery from a cultural standpoint. He identifies its prerequisites and its development in religious thought, and traces the emergence of the first hagiographic texts describing these paradoxical saints. He describes the beginnings of holy foolery in Egyptian monasteries of the fifth century, followed by its high point in the cities of Byzantium, with an eventual decline in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. He also compares the important Russian tradition of holy fools, which in some form has survived to this day.

Focusing on one of Russia's most powerful and wide-reaching institutions in a period of shattering dynastic crisis and immense territorial and administrative expansion, this book addresses manifestations of religious thought, practice, and artifacts revealing the permeability of political boundaries and fluid transfers of ideas, texts, people, objects, and "sacred spaces" with the rest of the Christian world. The historical background to the establishment Russia's Patriarchate, its chief religious authority, in various eparchies from Late Antiquity sets the stage. "The Tale of the Establishment of the Patriarchate," crucial for legitimizing and promoting both this institution and close cooperation with the established tetrarchy of Eastern Orthodox patriarchs emerged in the 1620s. Their attitude remained mixed, however, with persisting unease concerning Russian pretensions to equality. Regarding the most crucial "other" for Christianity's self-identification, the contradictions inherent in Christianity's appropriation of the Old Testament became apparent in, for example, the realm's imperfectly enforced ban on resident Jews. The concept of ordained royalty emerged in the purported co-rulership of the initial Romanov Tsar Michael and his father, Patriarch Filaret. As a pertinent foil to Moscow's patriarchs, challenges arose from Petro Mohyla, a metropolitan of the then totally separate Kievan church, whose Academy became the most important educational institution for the Russian Orthodox Church into the eighteenth century, combining a Romanian regal, Polish aristocratic, and Ukrainian Orthodox self-identity.

The Asketikon of St Basil the Great comprises a new English translation and studies which re-examine the emergence of monasticism in Asia Minor. The Regula Basilii, translated by Rufinus from Basil's Small Asketikon, is closely compared with the Greek text of the longer edition, as a means to tracing the development of ideas. Silvas concludes that the antecedents of the monastic community of the Great Asketikon are best sought not in some kind of sub-orthodox modus vivendi of male and female ascetics living together and increasingly curbed by an emerging neo-Nicene orthodoxy less favourable to women ('homoiousian asceticism'), but in the local domestic ascetic movement in Anatolia as typified in the developments at Annisa under the leadership of Makrina.

Here is the book that converted C. S. Lewis from atheism to Christianity. This history of mankind, Christ, and Christianity is to some extent a conscious rebuttal of H. G. Wells' Outline of History, which embraced both the evolutionary origins of humanity and the mortal humanity of Jesus. Whereas Orthodoxy detailed Chesterton's own spiritual journey, this book illustrates the spiritual journey of humanity, or at least of Western civilization. A book for both mind and spirit.

The volume contains contributions dedicated to the person and the work of Shalva Nutsubidze and his scholarly interests: the Christian Orient from the fifth to the seventh century, the Georgian eleventh century, the Neoplatonic philosopher Ioane Petritsi and his epoch and Shota Rustaveli and mediaeval Georgian culture. Among the articles are a new edition and translation of the original Georgian author's Preface to the lost Commentary on the Psalms by Ioane Petritsi and the editio princeps with an English translation of an epistle of Nicetas Stethatos (eleventh century), whose Greek original is lost. The traditions of Georgian mediaeval thought are considered in their historical context within the Byzantine Commonwealth and are traced in both philosophy and poetry.

This book is a classic in the history of the Oriental Churches, which are sometimes portrayed as heretical in general church history books, if mentioned at all. Written by a Copt, it portrays the history of the faith of these non-Chalcedonian Churches with first-hand knowledge of their traditions. The author covers Alexandrine Christianity (the Copts and the Ethiopians), the Church of Antioch (Syriac Orthodox), the "Nestorian" Church of the East, the Armenian Church, the St. Thomas Christians of South India, the Maronite Church, as well as the Vanished Churches of Carthage, Pentapolis, and Nubia.

With a combination of essay-length and short entries written by a team of leading religious experts, the two-volume En cyclopedia of Eastern Orthodoxy offers the most comprehensive guide to the cultural and intellectual world of Eastern Orthodox Christianity available in English today. * An outstanding reference work providing the first English language multi-volume account of the key historical, liturgical, doctrinal features of Eastern Orthodoxy, including the Non-Chalcedonian churches * Explores of the major traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy in detail, including the Armenian, Byzantine, Coptic, Ethiopic, Slavic, Romanian, Syriac churches * Uniquely comprehensive, it is edited by one of the leading scholars in the field and provides authoritative but accessible articles by a range of top international academics and Orthodox figures * Spans the period from Late Antiquity to the present, encompassing subjects including history, theology, liturgy, monasticism, sacramentology, canon law, philosophy, folk culture, architecture, archaeology, martyrology, hagiography, all alongside a large and generously detailed prosopography * Structured alphabetically and topically cross-indexed, with entries ranging from 100 to 6,000 words

What were the historical and cultural processes by which Cyril of Alexandria was elevated to canonical status while his opponent, Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, was made into a heretic? In contrast to previous scholarship, Susan Wessel concludes that Cyril's success in being elevated to orthodox status was not simply a political accomplishment based on political alliances he had fashioned as opportunity arose. Nor was it a dogmatic victory, based on the clarity and orthodoxy of Cyril's doctrinal claims. Instead, it was his strategy in identifying himself with the orthodoxy of the former bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, in his victory over Arianism, in borrowing Athanasius' interpretive methods, and in skilfully using the tropes and figures of the second sophistic that made Cyril a saint in the Greek and Coptic Orthodox Churches.

In modern Russia, the question is raised about the revival of the spirituality of the population, which increases interest in studying the history of the church. In the pre-revolutionary period, the Orthodox Church in the Russian Empire had a significant impact on the formation of national culture and statehood. Actively cooperating with the state, the Orthodox Church has accumulated vast experience in the field of education, missionary work, and charity. This experience in today's Russia can be used to solve the most important tasks in the moral education of young people who will contribute to the future of Russia. Examining the Relationship Between the Russian Orthodox Church and Secular Authorities in the 19th and 20th Centuries focuses on the system of spiritual education, the social and psychological characteristics of the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the tradition of Orthodox pilgrimage. It explores the key areas of charitable and educational activities of the Orthodox Church during the period of religious transformation in the 19th and 20th centuries. Covering topics such as missionary activity, secular authority, and church land tenure, this premier reference source is a dynamic resource for historians, anthropologists, sociologists, researchers in politics and religion, librarians, students and faculty of higher education, and academicians.