The Reverend George Percy Badger and the Syrian Orthodox communities of the Tur Abdin. Contact with the Protestant West and its consequences – Professor Robert Brenton Betts,
American University of Beirut. To be read at the Symposium on Mor Michael the Syrian, October 1-8, at Saint Ephrem Theological Seminary, Ma’arat Saydnaya, Syria. Mor Michael the Syrian is best known for his Chronicles which are a major source of how Muslims and non-Catholic Christians of his time viewed the era of the Crusades. Today I would like to address a later crusade, about which Michael would have had equal, if not stronger, reservations, that of the missions of the Church of Rome, beginning in the middle of the 16th century, and later the various Protestant sects of Britain and...
Read MoreThe Challenges that confronted the Syrian Orthodox Church in the era of mor Michael the Great 1126-1199 A.D. – Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim
(1) The Syrian Orthodox historians have all agreed in their eulogistic tributes to our revered Patriarch Mar Michael the Great. They have appreciated his gifts, struggles, sacrifices and services. Patriarch Ephrem I Barsoum described him thus: “One of the greatest prelates of God’s church, one of the finest patriarchs of Antioch, a famous intellectual historian, whose name is eternal, whose endeavors are beautiful, whose ways are praised, whose virtues are known, and whose deeds are righteous.”1 I would like to summarize in my paper the most important challenges that...
Read MoreAhiqar’s Proverbs – Dr. Arthur Brown
-What is stronger than braying ass ? the load -The son who is trained and taught and on whose feet the fetter is put shall prosper. -Withhold not thy son from the rod, else thou wilt not be able to save him from wickedness. -If I smite thee, my son, thou wilt not die, but if I leave thee to thine own heart thou wilt not live. -A blow for a bondman, a rebuke for a bondwoman, and for all thy slaves discipline. -One who buys a runaway slave or a thievish handmaid squanders his fortune and disgraces the name of his father and his offspring with the reputation of his wantonness. -The scorpion...
Read MoreStorytelling, the Meaning of Life, and The Epic of Gilgamesh – Arthur A. Brown
Stories do not need to inform us of anything. They do inform us of things. From The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, we know something of the people who lived in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the second and third millenniums BCE. We know they celebrated a king named Gilgamesh; we know they believed in many gods; we know they were self-conscious of their own cultivation of the natural world; and we know they were literate. These things we can fix — or establish definitely. But stories also remind us of things we cannot fix — of what it means to be human. They...
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