Three books that were published in 2012 and 2013 deserve attention, even if the ‘current’ in these books is that of three years ago. The first is that of Najib Awad, now a professor at Hartford Seminary, and born and raised in Syria. His book, And Freedom Became a Public-Square: Political, Sociological and Religious Overviews on… Continue reading #7 Current issues: Christians in Syria and Turkey
Month: July 2015
#6 Syriac Encounters
It has arrived, the volume with the papers of the Sixth North American Syriac Symposium that took place four years ago at Duke University. The conference, organized by Luk van Rompay together with Maria Doerfler, Emanuel Fiano and Kyle Smith (see his Academia page for an overview of its contents), was a real event in… Continue reading #6 Syriac Encounters
#5 Petrus in Leiden
(St. Peter's Confessions: a Dan-Brown type novel about Leiden’s connection with one of Christianity’s founders – light summer reading involving Leiden’s major festival, scholars and students, biblical interpretation, Aramaic and Greek, early Christian history and sixteenth-century Leiden history.) Om niet de indruk te wekken me zelfs in de zomervakantie alleen maar met het serieuzere werk bezig… Continue reading #5 Petrus in Leiden
#4 Vernacular religion in the Middle East
James Grehan, Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (OUP 2014) Searching out the #baraka of the holy man or woman, visiting their tombs to pray for your relatives, sleeping overnight in a sanctuary to seek the blessing of motherhood, wearing a talisman with sacred scripture, gathering water from a sacred well… Continue reading #4 Vernacular religion in the Middle East
#3 Christians in the Ottoman Empire Revisited (Krimsti & Çolak)
Recently two well-researched additions to Ottoman Studies landed on my desk, both touching upon the position of Christians and other non-Muslim minorities, both concerning hot topics of current research: Feras Krimsti’s Die Unruhen von 1850 in Aleppo: Gewalt im urbanen Raum (2014) about nineteenth-century violence directed at Christians and Hasan Çolak’s The Orthodox Church in… Continue reading #3 Christians in the Ottoman Empire Revisited (Krimsti & Çolak)
#1 New beginnings
Mysteriously, what should have been the first blog at this new location disappeared in cyberspace - immediately overwritten by number 2, but here it is again. Almost exactly three years ago I posted my last blog on my Leiden University page Globalisering, christendom en het Midden-Oosten. From then on, my days were spent with (admin) matters that… Continue reading #1 New beginnings
#2 Revival and Awakening
It seems fitting to mark my return to cyberspace with a solid book that was published earlier this year by Chicago Press, Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism. Adam Becker, whose first monograph was concerned with the earlier history of Syriac Christianity (Fear of God and the… Continue reading #2 Revival and Awakening
Globalization, Christianity and the Middle East 