"Singing the Scriptures and preaching the Word"

Orthodoxy and the Sacred Arts: Papers of the 8th Annual International Conference of the Sophia Institute. Dec. 2015., 2016

Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology

Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology

Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology

Oxford Handbook to the Early Church

Greek Christian hymns are a massive part of the surviving literary record of the early church, but have rarely attracted the level of scholarly attention that they deserve. This article discusses Greek hymnody; the classical origins of the Greek Christian hymns; the Bible and the ancient liturgy; stages of Syrian influence on Byzantine hymnography; hymns of the heterodox-orthodox Struggles; littérateur poets in Greek late antiquity; and the flowering of Byzantine hymnography in the sixth to eleventh Centuries. In Greek hymnody, one can see creed, antiphon, poem, prayer, song, and sacrament welded to form a seamless unity: here Byzantine theology, mysticism, and liturgical chant merge into a profound symbiosis in a programme that already consciously understood itself to be a the ology of beauty and of culture. The ancient hymn is thus a potent symbol, still awaiting its full articulation.

Brill, 2020

These papers explore the literature of Byzantine liturgical communities and provide a window into lived Christianity in this period. The liturgical performance of Christian hymns and sermons creatively engaged the faithful in biblical exegesis, invited them to experience theology in song, and shaped their identity. These sacred stories, affective scripts and salvific songs were the literature of a liturgical community – hymns and sermons were heard, and in some cases sung, by lay and monastic Christians throughout the life of Byzantium. In the field of Byzantine studies there is a growing appreciation of the importance of liturgical texts for understanding the many facets of Byzantine Christianity: we are in the midst of a liturgical turn. This book is a timely contribution to the emerging scholarship, illuminating the intersection between liturgical hymns, homiletics and hermeneutics.

The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1995

Largely because the processes of transmission have been unkind, the religious hymns sung by the Greeks during worship of a god on a public or private occasion have received less than their due attention from modern scholars. Our sources frequently mention in passingthathymns were sung on the way to Eleusis, for example, or at the well Kallichoron on arrival at Eleusis, or by the deputations to Delos for the Delia, but they usually fail to record the texts or contents of these hymns. Until the fourth century BC temple authorities did not normally have the texts of cult songs inscribed; and the works themselves were by a diversity of authors, some well-known, some obscure, making the collection of their ‘hymns’ a difficult task for the Alexandrian compilers. Some such hymns were traditional—Olen's at Delos, for example — handed down orally from generation to generation; others were taught to a chorus for a specific occasion and then forgotten. Nor do the surviving corpora of ‘hymn...