Irish philosopher and priest Dr Brendan Purcell has spent years endeavouring to unravel what makes us human, investigating the mystery of human origins and exploring the drama of human existence. In this work written in his honour, the contributors offer their own valuable insights into the human voyage of self-discovery. They guide us through some of the teachings of significant authors, such as Plato, William of Ockham, John Henry Newman, Walker Percy, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Eric Voegelin, Bernard Lonergan, Patrick Kavanagh, Chiara Lubich, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Lévinas. They also offer us reactions on topics such as faith and science, religious freedom and dialogue, Trinity and creation, language and human symbolism, bodiliness, art, holiness and conscience.

This booklet, to aid in reflecting on and praying the Stations of the Cross, takes as its inspiration and illustration the Passionist Retreat Centre, Tobar Mhuire, in Crossgar, Co. Down, and the beautiful Stations installed there. The Stations follow the biblical Stations as introduced by Pope John Paul II in 1991, with Kieran Hill providing thoughtful and reflective meditations on each.

Treasures of Irish Christianity was published to great acclaim in the summer of 2012. This second volume offers readers further scholarly yet readily-accessible short articles on a vast array of treasures from the Irish Christian tradition, with a focus on the Irish and their relationship with the Word. It covers items ranging from religious folk tales to reflections on Yeats, Joyce, Kavanagh and Beckett; from words on the margins of ancient manuscripts to the first Lutheran congregation in Dublin; from early High Crosses to the thirteenth-century Kilcormac Missal; from the Medieval Office of St Brigid to Pugin architecture; and from Church of Ireland hymnody to the recent Share the Good News publication. Written by a large number of Irish scholars from a variety of disciplines, this second volume is also richly illustrated.

This book presents a detailed analysis of the Aramaic mnemonics, those short witty sentences written in Aramaic as memory aids in the margins of one of the oldest extant biblical Hebrew manuscripts, the Leningrad Codex (1008 CE). The material is presented in clear, user-friendly charts. Each mnemonic is set alongside the Hebrew verses it represents. This book demonstrates the ingenuity of the Masoretes in their grand endeavor to preserve the text of the Hebrew Bible precisely in the form that it had reached them.

This volume acknowledges the contributions of Syriac Christians in the fields of culture, education and civil society throughout the history in the Middle East and India, and examines the challenges of living and professing the Christian faith as a minority in a multi-religious and pluralistic society, giving special attention to religious freedom and personal status.

This volume contains the Syriac version, with English translation and copious literary and historical notes, of Eusebius’s small book on the martyrs of Palestine, edited from a Syriac manuscript dated to 411.

Wright’s edition of the homilies of the early Syriac father, Aphrahat, includes the text, critical apparatus, and notes on biblical citations, which are also indexed. The preface surveys Aphrahat’s life and deals with the manuscripts used.

This early history of the Church of the East was part of a volume issued to commemorate the exhibition of thirty Syriac inscriptions from Central Asia at the Musee Guimet.

Originally published in 1997, this is a lively and readable account of the life of Colum Cille. Considered one of the three patron saints of Ireland, little is known about Colum Cille, although stories about him range from his founding a monastery on the island of Iona to starting a war by copying another man’s book. Desmond Forristal details the main events of the saint’s career and also includes the best-known tales and legends. He paints a picture of a man to be reckoned with – fiery, idealistic, learned, a respector of nature and lover of humankind, a fearless preacher and missionary. Above all, he shows us a man who lived his life in the presence of God.

This volume collects together for the first time the most influential papers of the late scholar of Georgian and New Testament textual critic, J. Neville Birdsall. Professor Birdsall wrote on Greek witnesses to the New Testament text, the Georgian version of the New Testament, palaeography, patristics, and the theory of textual criticism. The collection fully demonstrates the author’s standing as one of the most learned and wide-ranging New Testament textual scholars of modern times.

Although scholars have often made inferences about the Greek texts that lay behind the Old Syriac and Peshitta versions of the Gospels, very few have ever attempted to formulate systematic rules for such inferences. This volume investigates a wide range of textual phenomena and formulates clear and simple rules for the use of Syriac texts as witnesses to the underlying Greek. It becomes possible to uncover errors that have accumulated during the evolution of the Greek New Testament textual apparatus. Williams argues these errors generally stem from the unjustified use of Syriac witnesses.

This volume contains papers from the First International Congress on Eastern Christianity held in Córdoba, Spain, November 2005. The encounter of medieval Christian writers with several linguistic traditions through the Middle Ages produced one of the most important branches of Middle Eastern literature. This encounter not only changed the nature of the respective writings throughout time, but also influenced considerably the development of the legacies transmitted by the writers and the scholars of various Eastern Christian churches.

Codex Sinaiticus is one of the oldest, famous, and most important manuscripts of the Bible. At least three scribes copied the text manually, and they were faced with many decisions: What do I do when I spot an error in the text I just copied? What is the right spelling of this word? Is it time for a new paragraph? This book studies a variety of textual and non-textual phenomena in Codex Sinaiticus. We discover more about this important biblical manuscript as well as the individuals with their own habits, qualities, and skill levels who produced it.

This book is intended to provide a quick introductory overview of the Tiberian Masoretic tradition of the Hebrew Bible and its background. It was this tradition that produced the great Masoretic codices of the Middle Ages, which form the basis of modern printed editions of the Hebrew Bible. Particular prominence is given to the multi-layered nature of the Masoretic tradition. The volume contains a section describing the Tiberian reading tradition, which is essential for a correct understanding of the vocalization system.

This book completely redefines our understanding of fin de siècle Anglo-Jewish author Amy Levy and her writing. Demonstrating that Levy’s writing is less anti-Judaic and more profoundly influenced by the religious concerns of classical German Reformism, Luke Devine's innovative approach reveals that Levy's writing constitutes a genre whose female subjectivity evinces a concern for justice and authority that prefigures numerous aspects of Second-Wave Jewish feminist theory and its spiritual and theological underpinnings.

The Syriac Bible is a fascinating field to which too little research has been devoted. In the present volume, Jan Joosten gathers a number of pilot studies, published in various journals and collective volumes, shedding light on the Syriac Old Testament, New Testament, and the relation between them. A number of studies advance the claim that the Old Syriac and Peshitta gospels preserve echoes of an Aramaic gospel tradition that gives independent access to the earliest, oral traditions on the life and teaching of Jesus.