From the Holy Mountain
Kaldjian, Paul
economic exchange and geographical proximity, that unity around shared norms and symbols is critical to a healthy polity. And it is true, as Bennett says, both that we need moral exemplars...
...Manuscripts Wanted MANUSCRIPTS WANTED...
...of the role Maronite Christians played in the destruction of Lebanon...
...The insulting descriptions distract from his critical analyses, and can easily sabotage good intentions and constructive dialogue...
...As it is now, Christianity in its early years was full of spiritual searching, conflict, and uncertainty...
...It is as if his five months of living with John Moschos, the wisdom of the desert fathers, and the faithfulness of today's monks has had a tonsuring effect on him...
...John Moschos's sixth-century account marked the beginnings of the disappearance of Christianity from the Middle East...
...In From the Holy Mountain, we read about Byzantine saints, sophists, and ascetics...
...The Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan asserts, "Christians in Syria are better off in Syria than anywhere else in the Middle East...
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...But, alas, this last presumption is no longer viable (if it ever was), and his reliance on it lends to Bennett's argument an air of nostalgia that undermines its persuasiveness...
...Like the sisters at the Convent of Seidnaya in Syria who gracefully accept the petitions and prayers of Muslims, Dalrymple drops the language of difference...
...Commonweal 2 8 November 20, 1998 bring those who were with me, kill you all, and even destroy your monastery...
...Application deadline: December 4, 1998...
...As fine a job as Dalrymple does of weaving the accounts and anecdotes of John Moschos into his travels, of distilling a vast amount of secondary sources into a presentation very accessible to the lay reader (without boring the academic), and of compassionately capturing the origins, perspectives, and plight of Middle East Christians, his portrayal of other Middle Easterners at times teeters between elitist and rude...
...of politicized archeology in Israel...
...The disappearance of Christians from throughout the Middle East has drastically accelerated in the twentieth century and, within a generation, what Dalrymple has documented will in all likelihood no longer exist...
...Position Available SCHOOL OF THE HOLY CHILD, Rye, New York, Head of School, July 1999...
...We meet monks who perched on pillars and lived in trees, other monks who waged violent battle against immorality, and hermits who, having bathed once in Christ, believed that bathing was no longer a necessity: "and believe me, my brothers, I, Pambo, this least one, smelt the good odor of that brother from a mile away...
...Staffed by a dedicated group of 37 full- and part-time faculty and administrators, the school is academically challenging and provides a liberal arts curriculum appropriate to students' needs, interests, and abilities...
...The school's yearly budget is approximately $3 million...
...Nor should we expect candidates forced to trawl in the depths of presidential electioneering to smell as sweet as before the process...
...But such hopes are for the future...
...More to the point, the sarcasm used to portray the rural places and peasants of Turkey and Syria suggests stereotypes one would expect his book to avoid...
...From the Holy Mountain portrays a Middle East very different from sterec~ types...
...At the end of his life, Heidegger suggested that the human condition was so dismal that only a God could save us...
...However, the local abbot was reluctant to admit the repentant thief, who in turn replied, "Know then that I am David the robber chief...
...One hopes that the health of our political system will not require deliverance of the same magnitude...
...And it is true, as Bennett says, both that we need moral exemplars and that presidents have often filled that role in our national consciousness...
...As anyone who has traveled by bus in Anatolia knows, you get what you pay for...
...of the official versions of Israeli and Turkish history regarding Palestinian, Greek, and Armenian Christians...
...If you do not accept me, I swear to you and before him who dwells in heaven, that I will return to my former way of life...
...fortunately, this ascetic experience seems to have taken the cynical edge off Dalrymple...
...By the end of his journey, he seems more serene and is able to describe harmonious relationships between Muslims and Christians not as oddities or with surprise, but as eminently reasonable and right...
...Similarly, the difficulties of Christians under Israeli rule and their subsequent mass migration from Jerusalem and the surrounding regions mean that the "most important shrines in the Christian world will be left as museum pieces....Christianity will no longer exist in the Holy Land as a living faith...
...This is not meant as a counsel of despair: good people are working against awesome odds to ensure that candidates can get elected who possess qualities more laudable than the coolly reptihan fixation on winning that Clinton's career displays and that Bennett presents so dearly...
...Financial aid and scholarship awards represent 12 percent of tuition revenues...
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...For three hundred years, Christianity, in its early, multiple, and frequently bizarre interpretations, was the primary religion of much of the Middle East...
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...John Moschos and his earlier contemporaries lived closer in time, space, and culture to Jesus of Nazareth than we do to Columbus or the Pilgrims...
...In the educational tradition of the foundress, Cornelia Connelly, Holy Child seeks to foster and develop individuals capable of assuming responsibility for their own learning and growth, aware of their own value, and willing to involve themselves in service to others...
...And yet, consensus on interpreting and living the message of Christ appears to have been as unattainable then as it is today...
...Interested candidates should send a letter of interest, statement of educational philosophy, current r6sum6, and the names of five professional references to: Gregory Floyd, Vice President, Browning Associates, P.O...
...I will David McCabe teaches philosophy at Colgate University...
...On taking an overnight bus in Turkey, Dalrymple writes, "The rutted roads, the bracing crash of the long-defunct suspension, the snoring Anatolian peasants: these one expects and can bear...
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...ILASSIFIEB Paul Kaldjian is a Ph.D...
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...Box 671, Ipswich, MA 01938...
...and the reason I came here was that I might weep for my sins...
...Scotland Tour LATE JULY - EARLY AUGUST 1999 including Northern England...
...Even the Ottoman Empire, until the emergence of nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century, was built on a system that encouraged religious tolerance and ethnic diversity...
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...One Lebanese academic says that, "It is the Christian Arabs who keep the Arab world 'Arab' rather than "Muslim.' It is the Christian Arabs who show that Arabs and Muslims are two different things....Many Muslims [and, certainly, Christians in North America] regard Arab history as having little meaning by itself, outside the context of Islam...
...The school currently enrolls 229 students in grades 5-12...
...With the inspiration of the monk and a translation of Meadow as spiritual and tour guides, the Scottish journalist William Dalrymple set out to learn what remains of the people and places that John Moschos visited a millennium-anda-half ago...
...Certainly, five months of traveling overland in the Middle East will test one's endurance...
...It is reported that David went on to "exceed all the other members of the monastery in self-control, obedience, and humility...
...There are numerous similarities between the practices of Muslims and Christians, and among the holy places where each prays, petitions, and gives thanks...
...Reverend Griffie: (606) 573-9771...
...From the Holy Mountain is the log of Dalrymple's observations and reflections on his journey from Mount Athos--the Holy Mountain, where the original manuscripts of The Spiritual Meadow are kept--in Northern Greece, to the ruins of the Lavra of the Great Oasis in Kharga, Upper Egypt...
...We can have no illusions about what it takes to get elected president today: the process surpasses both legislating and sausage-making in its power to disgust...
...readers may have cheered when Beowulf emerged from the swamp after slaying Grendel's mother, but he must have stunk to high heaven...
...This is in stark contrast to the level of daily difficulty and fear faced by today's Christians in Israel, Turkey, and Egypt, ironically the United States' closest friends in the region...
...587, the Byzantine traveler-monk, John Moschos, began a thirty-year journey across Egypt, Palestine, the Levant, and Anatolia, to collect the memorable sayings, anecdotes, and holy stories known throughout the region's monasteries and Christian communities...
...ALL TYPES...
...Persecuted Palesfinian Christians in Lebanon find refuge not among local Christians but declare, "The Muslims treated us very well....The Muslims I know are better Christians than most Christians...
...Located on a seventeen-acre estate in the southern Westchester community of Rye, Holy Child is an independent, Catholic, college preparatory school for young women founded by the Sisters of the Holy Child in 1904...
...Recognizing this encourages a less categorical and more constructive understanding of the peoples and religions of the contemporary Middle East...
...CHRISTIANITY AT EBB TIDE Paul Kaldjian i n A.D...
...In contrast to the difficulties faced by today's Middle Eastern Christians, he learns that the spaces and theologies of Christianity and Islam have been intertwined historically far more closely than current conflicts suggest...
...His travel memoir, The Spiritual Meadow, became widely known and translated across the Byzantine world...
...For now, Clinton is ours, and the public's sufferance of his failings, while dispiriting to some, probably just represents their adaptation to a dismal political landscape that can inspire in any sensible person only rage or indifference...
...From the Holy Mountain is at once a window into the early years of Christianity--a Christianity quite dissociated from the institutions with which we are most familiar in North America-and a contemporary picture of a community of Christians equally remote from North Americans...
...There is also the repentant bandit, filled with the desire to become a monk...
...The loss has its cost...
...He talks with monks, priests, lay Christians, and others about their pasts and presents...
...In fact, many in the past believed, like the seventh-century theologian Saint John Damascene, that Islam, rather than being a separate religion, was another new and heretical form of Christianity...
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...The school raises $400,000 annually from charitable donations, including the annual fund...
...There are Muslims and Christians that still visit each other's shrines...
...Given the realities of our political scene today, the American public may just have decided to put up with some rank offense in the White House in the name of other, more important principles...
...Such associations from the early stages of each religion may help explain Islam's traditional tolerance of religious minorities and how Islam was able to convert much of the Middle Eastern population so quickly...
...Presidential campaigns, which are today chiefly moneydriven, media-driven, and poll-driven, could not be designed any more effectively to eliminate individuals of integrity and principle...
...Dalrymple does not hide his opinion of aggressive West Bank settlement...
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...These are not impressions generally gathered from the nighty news...
...or of the oppression of Coptic Christians by Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt...
...candidate in the Department of Geography and Regional Development at the University of Arizona...
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...Consequently, Dalrymple is compelled to document Christianity's final stages in the region...
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...What is intolerable is the deliberate regime of sleep deprivation imposed on all passengers by this driver and his henchman, the Commonweal 2 9 November20, 1998 moustachioed Neanderthal of a conductor...
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Vol. 125 • November 1998 • No. 20
