Through fieldwork, collection of published materials, workshops, lectures, classes, professional and peer-reviewed publications, the building of a public database (The Four Corners of the World Library), and exhibitions, we have extensively mapped and analyzed the Oriental Orthodox publications in Europe. In this way, the study of these largely popular textual materials helps to understand a specific type of Christian religious practice in the context of diaspora and migration, a textual practice that is at the heart of how these communities position themselves in the European realm, as a teaching and learning community poised to transmit their heritage to the new generation in a way that suits the contemporary context. Additionally, the project added to our understanding at more conceptual and comparative levels.
Firstly, as hypothesized, the textual materials are an exciting and fruitful source that needs to be explored in more detail. If anything, our project has shown that these materials are there, can be collected and analyzed with a bit of effort and can be used in manifold ways to better understand the literary developments in these churches; most importantly they show how the earlier textual tradition (including longstanding traditional liturgical, theological and historical texts) are transmitted, translated and re-interpreted in the modern period and put to use to teach clergy and laity alike.
Secondly, the project has shown that these materials can serve as a source for delineating and analyzing Oriental Christian self-understanding in the European context, with individual texts showcasing discourses on language, communal history and theology. As importantly, the corpus of written materials as such, helps to better understand how language and literature, theology and learning, teaching and education function in these communities, ‘teaching tradition transnationally’. The corpus show how these churches use their ancient texts in new ways and complement them with new texts to adapt teaching and learning to current circumstances. Until our project foregrounded and collected these contemporary texts, they were mostly overlooked.
Thirdly, the project has shown how these books are also intrinsically part of religious practice as material objects. This addresses current understandings of religion that tend to separate ‘lived religion’ from the religion ‘of the books’, or that separates ‘folk’ religion from ‘elite religion’. What our project has brought to the fore, is that in this particular type of Christianity books are part of religious practice as much as of religious thought, as practice of the learned and the not so learned; they are part of how you do religion: by publishing, distributing and reading books, but also by carrying, displaying, touching and gifting them.
Thus, fourth, in the combination of meaning and practice, the books that we collected and analyzed have emerged as material objects, whose colors, images, sizes, feel, and smell are important in understanding their role in religious tradition and religious practice. In this, images in particular help us to track all kinds of connections within and outside of the communities, connections that are not always explicitly referred to in the texts. It emerged that images, more than texts, are easily shared between traditions, both within Orthodoxy, and within Christianity in a wider sense - as is confirmed by a quick look at the database starting page which features the covers of the books.
Finally, fifth, the ways in which we see these ‘bookish practices’ in this type of Orthodox Christianity, strongly suggests that this is in fact not unique for this particular strand of religion, but might be indicative of religious practices in many other religions with strong literary traditions as well, such as Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. At the same time, a focus on these bookish practices has made us aware of the fact that there are significant differences in the way books are part of religious practice, between the Oriental Churches, between various types of Christianity, and, analogous, also within Islam, Judaism and Buddhism.
