Christ the Lover of Mankind: Philanthropia, Mystery, and Martyria in Eastern Christianity
Thursday, September 17, 2020
8:00 p.m. EDT
Join us at 7 p.m. CDT/8 p.m. EDT on Thursday, September 17th as we cosponsor a Zoom webinar with the Lumen Christi Institute in collaboration with the Godbearer Institute. Professor Robin Darling Young will present “Christ the Lover of Mankind: Philanthropia, Mystery, and Martyria in Eastern Christianity,” the third lecture in the fall webinar series Eastern Catholic Theology in Action. The Saint Benedict Institute is a cosponsor of this event series.
This webinar is free and open to the public and no preparation is necessary. The event will be presented on Zoom (registration required), as well as through live-stream on YouTube. For more information and to register for this webinar, click here.
Three features are common to all Eastern Christian traditions—philanthropia, mystery, and martyria. They appear repeatedly in Eastern Christian writing, ritual, and personal practice from the preaching of Jesus to the present. Philanthropia, God’s love for humanity, prompts the mission of the Logos to provide for humanity’s return to the divine. Mystery, which paradoxically reveals and conceals, both in ceremony and in “ordinary” time, the Logos’ saving events. Martyria is the sign and demonstration of God’s beckoning love and the replication of the “priesthood of all believers.” Dr. Young will explore these themes through examples, not only from the Greek and Slavic traditions, but also from those of the Christian traditions of the East, the Caucasus and Ethiopian Christianity.
Robin Darling Young (B.A., Mary Washington College; M.A., Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Associate Professor of Spirituality at the Catholic University of America. She has published and lectured widely on topics in the history of early Christianity and its thought, including the areas of scriptural interpretation, the history of asceticism and monastic thought, and the Christian cultures of ancient Syria and Armenia. Professor Darling Young is currently preparing an annotated translation of the Letters of Evagrius of Pontus from the surviving Syriac translation for the Fathers of the Church series (CUA Press), and directing a translation team that will produce English translations from the Greek texts and Syriac translations of the same author’s Gnostic Trilogy (Praktikos, Gnostikos, Kephalaia Gnostika) for Oxford University Press. She is the current president of the North American Patristics Society.