Worship traditions in Armenia and the neighboring Christian east. An international symposium in honor of the 40th anniversary of St Nersess Armenian seminary

The essays cover the following: whether the eucharistic anaphora was recited silently or not (Taft); the probability of Jewish influences on the Armenian anaphora, via the Syriac liturgy (Winkler); the ritual of vesting in the Armenian rite (Feulner); the likelihood that the displacement of the liturgy of Basil by that of Chrysostom was caused by a reaction to iconoclast arguments (Alexopoulos); distinctive features in Syriac liturgical texts deriving from Jewish motifs or from the Syriac Bible (Brock); the nature of the Armenian prayers attributed to St Ephrem the Syrian and the question of their authenticity (Mathews); classical Armenian homilies and biblical commentaries (Thomson); the late fifth-century Catholicos Mandakuni's 'Encyclical' on fasting (Terian); the liturgical imagination of the fourteenth-century Armenian monastic writer Grigor Tat'ewac'i (LaPorta); Vardan Aygekc'i's Holy places prayerbook, a thirteenth-century work intended for the inner pilgrimage as well as for an actual visit to Jerusalem (Ervine); a comparison of the spatial relationship between the altar and martyr relics in northern Syrian, Armenian and Egyptian churches (Larson-Miller); present-day Armenian spirituality (Zekiyan); the modern mystagogy of eastern liturgies (Hawkes-Teeples); an outline of the principal liturgical books of the West Syrian liturgy coupled with suggestions on how liturgical renewal could be achieved, in order to benefit the faithful (Aydin); a description of liturgical renewal in the monastery of New Skete, near Albany, NY (Br Stavros); and a plea for a return to the simplicity and beauty of the original Armenian liturgy, again for the edification of believers (Aivazian).