14 October, 2024
We are deeply honoured to welcome Dr Thomas Arentzen, Reader in Church History, and Senior Lecturer in Eastern Christian Studies at Stockholm School of Theology, and Sankt Ignatios College, Sweden, to lead a session of the Eastern Christianity in Interfaith Contexts Reading Group.
Here are the details of this fascinating event.
Title: Christian Trees
Abstract: How do Christian trees behave, and how have Christian humans interacted with them? Drawing on historical examples of religious plant behaviour in the Christian world, this talk explores tree piety as well as the piety of humans who mingle with trees. I shall suggest that trees may have played a more active part in the Christian religion than scholars and believers tend to give them credit for.
Speaker’s Biography: Dr Thomas Arentzen studied theology at the University of Oslo and went on to do a PhD in early Christianity at Lund University. From 2015 to 2019 he conducted his own postdoctoral research project Bodies in Motion: Religion and Corporeality in Late Antiquity at the University of Oslo (funded by the Research Council of Norway) and spent spring term 2016 as Visiting Scholar at Brown University. In 2018, he became Reader (docent) in Church History at Lund University. For the academic year 2018–19, he was awarded a fellowship in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Dr Arentzen’s research interests include Byzantine Christianity and ecology. He conducted the research project Beyond the Garden: An Ecocritical Approach to Early Byzantine Christianity (2019–2023 funded by the Swedish Research Council), which focused on trees in late ancient and Byzantine sources. In 2021 he wrote the monograph Byzantine Tree Life with two American colleagues. Dr Arentzen also specializes in early Christian poetry and devotional literature and has explored popular piety and literary expressions of Christian faith. His monograph The Virgin in Song studies representations of the Virgin Mary in late ancient poetry. Dr Arentzen serves as preses of the scholarly society Collegium Patristicum Lundense and article editor and editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Patristica Nordica Annuaria. He is member of the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul’s Research Collegium and of l’Association Internationale d’Études Patristiques (AIEP/IAPS)’s council.
Chair: Professor Sebastian Brock, FBA, University of Oxford, UK.
Date: 14 October, 2024
Time: 17:00-18:00 BST | 9:00-10:00 PDT | 12:00-13:00 EDT
Venue: online
If you would like to join the Eastern Christianity in Interfaith Contexts Reading Group, please sign up here.
Dr Arentzen’s Publications:
Related Sessions:
- Christian Trees
- Dialogue and Fire in a Fragmentary Syriac Martyrdom Narrative
- The Origins of the First Anti-Jewish Good Friday Hymns
- Finding a Home: The West Syriac Context of the Clementine Epistles on Chastity
- Who was Mary, the Blessed Virgin and Mother of God? A Byzantine hagiographical narrative by the ninth-century Monk Epiphanios
- Nikos Kazantzakis and Orthodox Christianity
- The Miracle of Pilgrimage: A Coptic Journey to the Holy Land During the Ottoman Period
- Setting the Stage: The Rose of Performance in Studying Late Ancient Hymnody
- Ephrem the Syrian and a New Beginning in Syriac Poetry
- A Jew Reads the Gospels in Syriac: Azariah de Rossi’s Critique of the Vulgate (1577)
- The Manuscript Project at the Coptic Monastery of St Paul the Hermit at the Red Sea, Egypt
- Mary’s Ordeal: A Syriac Narrative Poem on Many and Joseph
- Resurrection of the Human Body according to John of Dara’s Mimro I:4
- Gregory of Nyssa: On the Human Image of God
- ‘Conception by ear’ and Redemption of the Human Sensorium in Ephrem’s Thirty-fifth Madrasha on the Church
- From Edessa to South Arabia and Back: The Syriac Story of Bishop Paul and Priest John and Models of Sanctity in the Medieval Middle East
- Wrestling with Calculating-Thoughts: Mental Training according to Evagrius of Pontus
- Returning the Ticket: God and Evil in the Brothers Karamazov
- Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras: an Orthodox Dialogue with Islam
- Matta el-Meskin/Matthew the Poor: a ‘Contemporary Desert Father’ on Christian Unity
- Signs of Miraculousness: The Inimitability of Jacob of Serugh’s Teaching
- Epistolary Style in Coptic Letters from the Late Third Century to the Early Fifth Century
- Sarah and the Akedah: a Syriac Narrative Poem on Genesis 22
- The Paterik of the Kyivan Caves Monastery: Monk Polikarp in Discourse 14
- Jacob of Sarug on the Canaanite Woman (Mt 15:21-28, Mk 7:24-30): Biblical Storytelling and Models of Faith
- Commemorating the saints at Turfan: Mart Shir and Mar Barshabba
- The Opening Prayers of Saint Gregory of Narek’s Book of Lamentations
- Alexander Schmemann on Theotokos vis-à-vis Kali a Hindu Mother Goddess
- Enoch and the Fallen Angels in the Ethiopian Tradition
- Narsai on the Virgin Mary
- An Anonymous Syriac Dialogue between Mary and the Angel
- Dadisho of Qatar: Questioning the Desert Fathers
- George the Athonite on Matters of Faith and Rite, According to the Life of St George the Hagiorite
- Temple, Shekhinah and Prayer in Isaac of Nineveh’s III.VIII
- St. Ephrem’s Commentary on Genesis Ch.3
