19 May, 2025
We are deeply honoured to welcome Chorbishop Andrew Younan, the founding Rector of the Seminary of Mar Abba the Great, USA, to lead a session of the Eastern Christianity in Interfaith Contexts Reading Group.
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Here are the details of this fascinating event.
Title: Narsai’s Memra 49, on Adam and Eve: O Instructive Fault!
Abstract: Narsai’s Memra 49, concerning the creation and fall of Adam and Eve, as well as the story of Cain and Abel, is a typically sensitive Narsaian reading of Genesis 2-4. Narsai pays close attention to the narrative details of the Scriptural passages in question while weaving them together into one of his favorite theological themes, that of Divine Pedagogy. How did God use the creation of humanity to teach the rest of the created world about himself? How did he use the paradigmatic sins of the primordial human beings to teach them to grow? How does he use the Scriptural account of these events to teach us? God’s teaching is more than the promulgation of information; it is the formation of students into greater maturity and more perfect resemblance of the God in whose image we are created.
Speaker: Chorbishop Andrew Younan is the first American-born Chaldean priest, the founding Rector of the Seminary of Mar Abba the Great, and teaches philosophy and theology at John Paul the Great Catholic University (Escondido, California) and the University of St. Thomas, Houston. He is the author of Narsai: Selected Sermons (Paulist Press, 2024), The Book of Before & After: The Liturgy of the Hours of the Church of the East (The Catholic University of American Press, 2024), and several other works.
Chair: Professor Sebastian Brock, FBA, University of Oxford, UK.
Date: 19 May, 2025
Time: 17:00-18:00 BST | 9:00-10:00 PT | 12:00-13:00 ET
Venue: online
If you would like to join the Eastern Christianity in Interfaith Contexts Reading Group, please sign up here.
Revd Andrew Younan’s Publications
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