The Virginia H. Farah Annual Lecture, delivered by Susan Ashbrook Harvey, the Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University (USA) on the topic “Voices of the Liturgy: Gender and Performance in the early Byzantine Church” was successfully held in Volos (Forum Conference Center) on May 3, 2017; in Thessaloniki (in the Museum of Byzantine Culture) on May 4, 2017, in cooperation with the Biblical Studies, Patristics and Christian Literature Department of the School of Pastoral and Social Theology of the University of Thessaloniki, the Patriarchal and Stavropegic Vlatadon Monastery and the Patriarchal Institute of Patristic Studies, generously sponsored by the Museum of Byzantine Culture; and in Athens on May 8, 2017 (Amphitheatre Leonidas Zervas National Hellenic Research Foundation) in cooperation with the Program “Orality and Performance in Byzantium” of the National Hellenic Research Foundation.

The Thessaloniki lecture was greeted by His Excellency Bishop Nicephoros of Amorio, Abbot of the Holy Patriarchal and Stavropegic Monastery of Vlatadon, and Professor Simeon Paschalides, Vice-President of the School of Pastoral and Social Theology and Director of the Patriarchal Institute for Patristic Studies, ,while it was attended by professors and students of the Theological Faculty of the University, and by the Vice-President of the Pan-Hellenic Movement of theologians and teachers of Religious education “Kairos” Mr. Gregory Mavrokoustidis. In the Athens event, Dr. Niki Tsironis, Researcher at the National Hellenic Research Foundation greeted the audience on behalf of Prof. Taxiarhis Kollias, the Director of the Institute for Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation.

In her lectures, Prof. Harvey argued that the Early Byzantine liturgy, both Greek and Syriac, expressed the wholeness of the church community through the sounds of its voices. Clergy intoned invocations, litanies, readings and teachings. The voices of choirs prayed, extolled, and taught, while the voices of the congregation sounded their responses and proclaimed creed, prayer, and confession. With choirs and congregation, all voices present—male, female, young, old, lay and consecrated—sounded forth in liturgical expression.  Drawing particularly on the hymns of St. Ephrem the Syrian and St. Romanos the Melodist, and on the homilies of St. John Chrysostom and St. Jacob of Sarug, she explored how these different voices each were highlighted, valued, and rendered essential in the context of the worshipping community.

On May 6, 2017, the Virginia Farah Annual seminar on the topic “On the laity: Ancient Syriac Models” was also successfully held in Athens in cooperation with the Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation. In her presentation Prof. Harvey argued that with the triumph of Christianity during the fourth century, early Byzantine liturgy rapidly bloomed in splendor. In setting, ceremony, décor, and expression, liturgy gained complexity as well as beauty, and professionalization as well as grandeur. Ranks of ordained clergy and hosts of trained choirs performed the Church’s services. In the midst of this growing magnificence, the laity presented a challenge. How could ordinary people contribute to the offering of worship, in ways that could be seen, heard, and experienced as vital and significant for Christian faith? And with what authority might they do so? In this paper she took the instance of late antique Syriac Christianity to explore these issues, drawing especially on the works of St. Ephrem the Syrian and St. Jacob of Sarug.

Besides the featured speaker, the round table participants included Dr. Niki Tsironis, Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation (Greece) and Dr. Nikos Kouremenos, Post-Doctoral Fellow Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) and Academic associate of the Volos Academy for Theological Studies. University Professors, scholars, post-graduate and doctoral students were also joined the seminar.

Susan Ashbrook Harvey is the Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of Religious Studies, and the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence, at Brown University. She specializes in Syriac studies, early Christian history, and Christianity of the Byzantine and Syriac traditions, particularly with respect to women. She has received honorary doctorates from Grinnell College (Iowa), the University of Bern (Switzerland), and Lund University (Sweden), and is a past-President of the Orthodox Theological Society in America, and of the North American Patristic Society. A recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Professor Harvey has published widely in academic venues on women in ancient Christianity, monasticism, the cult of saints, hagiography, and early Christian hymnography. She is the author of Song and Memory: Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition (2010), Scenting Salvation:  Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (2006), and Asceticism and Society in Crisis:  John of Ephesus and the “Lives of the Eastern Saints” (1990). She is co-editor with Margaret Mullet of Knowing Bodies, Passionate Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium (forthcoming 2017);  co-author with several others of Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Women Whom Jesus Met (2016);  co-editor with David G. Hunter of the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (2008, 2010); and co-author with Sebastian P. Brock of Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (1987; 1998). Prof. Harvey is working on a new book tentatively titled Women’s Singing and Women’s Stories in Ancient Syriac Christianity. In addition to her academic obligations, Dr. Harvey serves on the Eastern Orthodox – Roman Catholic Bilateral Theological Consultation for North America, and is a tonsured chanter at St. Mary’s Antiochian Orthodox Church in Pawtucket, RI.

The lectures and the seminar were kindly sponsored by Virginia H. Farah Foundation.