Member: cstebbins

Second-hand knowledge of Church of Christ is close enough-ha!

My wife does not like to travel overseas, so I have done a lot of that by myself or with friends. In 2003, my friend Bill and I had frequent flyer miles enabling us to go anywhere in the world, but were both in a tight for ready cash. So, we had to go somewhere cheap, which back then was BULGARIA. Besides, we both had an affection for the old Balkan monarchies, and Simeon II had just been elected prime minister. So, we joked that we would go back and help him regain the throne. Anyway, I was hooked on the East, have never looked back to western Europe. Since then, I have been back to Bulgaria twice more, Romania, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, Albania, Greece (twice), Turkey (6 times), Georgia (twice), Armenia, Azerbaijan, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Israel. There’s more to the story, but basically, Bill and I walked into the church at the historic Rilla Monastery, and I was simply overcome by the holiness and sanctity of the place. Church of Christ people don’t believe in “holy places.” We were wrong. Although I didn’t really realize it right then, when I walked out I would never be the same. My friend Bill walked out the same disgruntled Episcopalian he was when he entered. So, my experience was for me alone, it seems. Like I say, there’s more to it, but that’s it in a nutshell.

Regarding your friend’s experience in Bulgaria: Yes, rural Bulgaria CAN be depressing. It is also wildly beautiful in many places. The Communists really did a number on Bulgaria—more so than perhaps any other European country save Albania. During the Communist era, there were only 900 farms in the entire country! I would imagine there are many more than that in your county—there certainly are in mine. Collectivization was the rule. The traditional Bulgarian villages were largely destroyed and the people relocated to new towns adjacent to a huge collective farms, or some unneeded factory. Of course, these new towns had no churches, as the Church was widely persecuted under Communism. In short, the new towns had no soul. When Communism fell, the collective farms fell apart and the factories closed. These artificial towns are dead or dying, with the young moving into the cities. That part is truly depressing. And consequently, much of rural Bulgaria is actually empty. Now, about your friend’s experience with the Bulgaria babushka—totally understandable under the circumstances. Her reaction was obviously based on some superstitious belief/rumor she had heard about Protestants—with whom she had certainly had no experience. Her reaction was certainly not based on any practice known to Orthodoxy. Money doesn’t enter the equation. And between 1945 and 1989, there was a lid on the Church in Bulgaria. So, even with the old people, they were largely unchurched, as we say, and just knew what perhaps they learned/preserved at home and subject to wild superstitions. That said, a Presbyterian on a medical mission to Bulgaria seeking to pray with a patient would have been something of an odd duck over there. Orthodox do not do the whole evangelical “let me pray with you” thing. Certainly, we add improvised prayer requests to our formal prayers, but that is not where we start. And she would have had no experience with anyone praying for her this way other than her priest—and would not have wanted anyone else to do so. It was simply the collision of two totally dissimilar cultures, where there was little common ground of understanding.

I’m in love with the South, as well, but recognize that we that there is a dark, tortured side to our history. Some of the best Southern writers have hit upon that dichotomy (for example—Faulkner’s Quentin Compson in “The Sound and Fury.”) I agree with your analysis about living up North vs. South. I think the difference is that they are further along than we are in moving into that post-Christian culture. That said, I have many friends up there, and like nothing better than going to NYC (and both my wife and I like the people there, believe it or not.) And for all the fact of the South being broadly a “Christian country,” I think this faith is often much shallower than we like to believe. There is a friend of mine at church, a Syrian doctor, who has practiced in NYC, Detroit, Chicago and now East Texas. Part of the agreement with the US, allowing him to come over here and practice, was that he devote a number of years in a poverty-stricken locale, sort of like community service, I guess. That explains the Detroit posting, but he also spent 7 years in Newport, AR, which he claims is the best experience in his life. He absolutely loved the people. But he commented that while he found few professing Christians up North, the ones he did encounter where the real thing. He contrasted that with Newport, where “everybody” was Christian, but the follow-through, you might say, left a lot to be desired. Whether there is anything to that, I do not know—just his perspective.

Well, I have rambled on at length, talking about myself. Please return the favor in your reply, as your life story sounds pretty interesting as well.

posted by tjohncowan at 5:05 pm (EST) on May 27, 2011

cstebbins,

Great to hear from you. I am new at Librarything. I signed up a few weeks back and started entering my books with a vengeance. I finally gave out with exhaustion! I am about 200 books away from having them entered, and hope to do so within coming weeks. I am still learning the ropes, though, and am not fully versed on all the aspects of Librarything just yet.

Thanks for checking out my blog, though I haven't posted much in recent months. My blog is fairly well known in Orthodox blogdom, particularly in past years for travel posts in the Balkans, Levant, Middle East and the Caucasus.

No problem with the questions. I encountered Orthodoxy in 2003 in Bulgaria, and was received into the Church in 2005. At the time, I had been a 25-year member of the Church of Christ--whether one characterizes them as "Evangelical" is open for debate. Not only that, but I was actually an elder in the Church of Christ (a young one, to be sure ;) Needless to say, it got messy.

Yes, I have a love-hate relationship with the South, and my roots--which I think must be the case for any thinking Southerner. Through the years, I have spent considerable time in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia (less so in the Carolinas.) Somehow, I've always missed Augusta, however.

I sympathize with your plight on trying to go from Evangelical to Roman Catholic. I think we Evangelical/Protestant types are just too hard-wired with anti-Catholic prejudice going back to the Reformation. I would think it a difficult transition. I never considered Catholicism, even for a moment--here again, the innate anti-Catholicism I think. But then, I was not "searching" when Orthodoxy found me. It was like being hit upside the head with a 2x4. I didn't know how, but there was no way that one day I would not be Orthodox.

I look forward to hearing from you again.

Best regards,

Terry (John) Cowan

posted by tjohncowan at 11:05 pm (EST) on May 15, 2011

I certainly don't mind comments at all! I actually know Warren Treadgold quite well. I earned my Ph.D. at Saint Louis University, and Warren was one of my major professors, and was on my dissertation committee. Also, I am still at William Carey. The website was "updated" seveal years ago, and it cut me off the departmental page, as well as one of my colleagues. It has never been fixed, much to my dismay. I am told it will be fixed with a new update later this year.

posted by mnicovich at 9:51 am (EST) on Nov 22, 2010

That's correct :) I'm actually going through the process now, not an RC quite yet. So, you tried Catholicism but didn't end up becoming a Catholic?

posted by shmuel777 at 10:25 pm (EST) on Jul 25, 2010

Ah, yes, he was grateful for money from Worcester College 'without [whose] generosity I would have become another lawyer'. Interesting that you read a 'just' into it, as I think I did. _Christians and Pagans_ is my favourite too, though I'm nowhere near getting round to reading _Travelling Heroes_ yet. I am a bit of a fan of M. L. West (_The East Face of Helicon_, _Indo-European Poetry and Myth_), and the links between early Greek culture and cultures in Asia Minor are very interesting, so I'm hoping for something thought-provoking.

posted by shikari at 5:32 am (EST) on Mar 5, 2010

The local histories are either inherited from my father and grandmother (the Kingham ones, relating to the village near which my father worked as a schoolmaster when I was a boy) or bought because of family connections (Malawi) or because I went to school there and one because it was written by my sixth-grade history and Latin teachers (Burford). I've stuck them in a separate collection. They were all on almost the last shelf to be catalogued in the flat.

The recent Syriac has almost all been found locally, mostly in Blackwells' second-hand department or at a bookfair at the weekend in Oxford (for the supplement to PS's Thesaurus Syriacus, the Aramaic incantation texts, the Weitzmann - which I've looked for for ten years! - and the Sokaloff). We're fortunate to have a theological bookseller here too - St Philip's Books - from whom I got the Baumstarck. We're lucky in that whenever a professor of theology or classics dies, the collection tends to come through Blackwells - hence the two volumes of St. Ephraim and the Syriac Kalila wa-Dimna.

You could check Salsus books on ABE (Jessie Payne-Smith and Weitzmann). But I don't know whether Blackwells come through the web at all.

Interesting that you say you feel "that local histories are a good complement to classical interests." The older Kingham book was indeed written by a very formidable Classical scholar indeed of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, W. Warde Fowler, who retired to the village.

Where do you source books? We are, I think, fortunate to be living at a time when most older and unobtainable books are available on Archive.org. I still have to print them (and they don't generally find their way onto my catalogue, which is almost all conventionally printed books) but access to older commentaries etc. is a real boon, especially where (unlike me) one doesn't have access to great reference libraries.

posted by shikari at 7:50 pm (EST) on Jan 26, 2010

The picture is taken looking north from the town of Pangnirtung up the Pangnirtung Fjiord which is a fjiord on the north side of Cumberland Sound, Baffin Island.

posted by Northlaw at 10:51 pm (EST) on Apr 12, 2009