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2 books match the query 'Becker, Adam H.'

cover of Isaac of Antioch: Homilies on Moral and Monastic Reform

Isaac of Antioch

Homilies on Moral and Monastic Reform

Adam H. Becker

SBL Press, 2024

This volume offers a critical edition and annotated translation of twenty metrical homilies attributed to Isaac of Antioch, a late fifth-century CE Syriac poet. The works in this collection, the majority of which are examples of the Syriac rebuke genre, are aimed at the moral reformation of the Syrian Christian community. The introduction, which provides the first detailed study of the manuscript tradition of the corpus as a whole, identifies four different Isaacs whose writings were intermingled already in late antiquity and develops criteria for distinguishing among their works. Scholars and students of church history will find this a valuable resource for the study of Syriac poetry and homiletics, Christian ideas of moral reform, and late antique monastic and lay devotional culture.

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cover of Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism

Revival and Awakening

American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism

Adam H. Becker

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Most Americans have little understanding of the relationship between religion and nationalism in the Middle East. They assume that the two are rooted fundamentally in regional history, not in the history of contact with the broader world. However, as Adam H. Becker shows in this book, Americans—through their missionaries—had a strong hand in the development of a national and modern religious identity among one of the Middle East's most intriguing (and little-known) groups: the modern Assyrians. Detailing the history of the Assyrian Christian minority and the powerful influence American missionaries had on them, he unveils the underlying connection between modern global contact and the retrieval of an ancient identity.         

American evangelicals arrived in Iran in the 1830s. Becker examines how these missionaries, working with the “Nestorian” Church of the East—an Aramaic-speaking Christian community in the borderlands between Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire—catalyzed, over the span of sixty years, a new national identity. Instructed at missionary schools in both Protestant piety and Western science, this indigenous group eventually used its newfound scriptural and archaeological knowledge to link itself to the history of the ancient Assyrians, which in time led to demands for national autonomy. Exploring the unintended results of this American attempt to reform the Orient, Becker paints a larger picture of religion, nationalism, and ethnic identity in the modern era. 
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