There are exceptions to the unwritten rules of Arabic hospitality. I quickly learned them when I asked the Cairo hookah bar proprietors where the bathroom was in my Midwestern Arabic. After a few ...

MALULA, Syria — Elias Khoury can still remember when old people in this cliffside village spoke only Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Back then the village, linked to the capital, Damascus, only by a ...

Qaraqosh, Tel Kepe, and Karamlesh are just three of the Iraqi towns on the Nineveh plains captured in early August by the Islamic State (IS), but they represent the last major concentration of Aramaic ...

What do these three locales have in common: a remote village in Syria; Sydney, Australia; and the Old City of Jerusalem? The answer is: Aramaic, a dominant language in the ancient world. Now, Jews, ...

Linda Güven. It is, says Linda Güven, a colorful community. "Secularly colorful," she stresses. The 35-year-old teacher belongs to the Syrian Orthodox church congregation "Mor Petrus and Mor Paulus" ...

The Sunday lectionary gospel reading for Lent 2 in Year A is Nicodemus' meeting with Jesus in John 3.1–17. The epistle is Romans 4.1-5 and 13-17. The video discussion of the epistle is here, and of ...

It was a sunny morning in May, and I was in a car with a linguist and a tax preparer trolling the suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus. The linguist, ...