SSCN Voumes 1-10, 1994-2004

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

discussion to this lecture was the most animated thus far. It dealt with the role that documentary evidence may play to clear some of these historical misconceptions as well as what is the reasonable figure for the population of Egypt at the time. Deacon Severus (Maged) is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at UCLA. 18. Electronic Edition of the Coptic Encyclopedia : Work is progressing on a faster scale on this project during the past quarter. The formatting template is complete along with all the separation of the ASCII files into their final file format. Formatting of the text is simultaneously being done in the Los Angeles area and in Ohio on all 8 volumes. Formatting, review, and conversion to PDF including graphics and internal links of volumes 1 through 7 are complete. Work on Volume 8, the most challenging, is about 15% complete in the Language portion, comprising 60% of the volume. The general Index portion of this volume is formatted and converted to PDF. The creation of the internal links to the other seven volumes is not yet completed. Also the so-called volume 9, which will include short annotations on articles that are being disputed by Coptic Church authorities and corrections of obvious errors, is at the early stages of work. These extra items will be electronically linked to the articles they pertain to. Each annotation will include the name of the presenter. Hany N. Takla, the Society's president, is in charge of this project, in his capacity as member of the Foundation's Executive Board. The projected completion date of the final production version of the CD is pushed back to July, 2001, God's willing. St. Mark Foundation, the Project sponsor, may defer some of these missing items to future editions. This may include the Coptic Grammar of Volume 8 which poses many technical difficulties within the software platform being used by the project. The Society will probably assume the responsibility for overseeing the distribution of this work.

sponsored by the University of California Multicampus Research Grant on the History and Culture of Late Antiquity, and the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. And it is organized by the UCLA Graduate Student Association for the Study of Late Antiquity. Attendees where mostly Professors and Graduate students of History from a variety of local, national, and even international universities. A few members of the Society and some of their friends and family attended along with the participants of the Sahidic Coptic class at the Center. The welcome that we all received was warm and extraordinary and we are much gratiful. Organizers, especially Scott McDonough, should be commended for the fine work done. Abstracts of the conference papers are available at the group's web page: http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~sjm1/lateantiquity . The Conference was organized in four different panels with a different moderator for each one. The introductory presentations included one by Dr. Claudia Rapp of the UCLA History Department, a participant at our 2000 Symposium on Coptic Monasticism. Two papers were of special interest to us which were conveniently placed in the third panel, moderated by our own Deacon Severus (Maged). The first by a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, Elisabeth O’Connell, on the hermitage at Nag’ el Deir in Upper Egypt. It was titled, "There is no town or village in Egypt or the Thebaid which is not surrounded by hermitages as if by walls. And the people depend on the prayers of these monks as if on God himself": The Case of Naga ed-Deir . It dealt with the site and its history and inscriptions. Though a commendable presentation, it was surprising to find that no field work was done for such a topic at that advanced stage of study! But we were told it was forthcoming. The second was by our own (soon to be Dr.) Mark R. Moussa. It was titled: Shenoute as Monk-Bishop: Coptic Representations of Authority and Communal Control in Fifth-Century Christian Egypt . In it he dealt with the historical aspects of St. Shenouda, through his extant and not-too-available writings.

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter 19. The Sixth Annual UCLA Graduate Late Antiquity Conference: This annual conference was successfully held on Saturday, May 12, 2001 at the Herbert Morris Seminar Room, Royce Hall 306, UCLA (the site of the Society’s 1999 Coptic Conference). It is

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