SSCN Voumes 1-10, 1994-2004

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

Future plans of St. Mark’s Museum: In the immediate future activities will consist of striving to meet the Museum’s four objectives; developing power point presentations for various uses and audiences; developing an interactive child’s programme on Coptic art; organising photo/poster exhibits; organising public lecture and joint exhibits with other Museum. The Museum Board also wants to show-case the work Coptic artists in Toronto and Canada. Members of the Board of Directors of St. Mark’s Museum and its Guides are actively seeking to expand museum exhibits. We are also involved in the planning for an expanded museum as part of development project of St. Mark’s Church on the recently acquire land. Website link to St. Mark’s Coptic Museum: www.stmark.toronto.on.coptorthodox.ca How balanced, complete, and fair can such an assessment be? It's as though an archeologist took thirteen potsherds from an early monastic site and reconstructed not just one pot, which might be possible, but also extrapolated from those clay fragments and that rebuilt pot not only the history of pot-making at the monastery but even the history of the monastery itself. Now imagine that you are Saint Shenoute the Great (348-464), archimandrite of the White Monastery in Upper Egypt, and that you have been time-warped to the twenty-first century: you are sitting in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, next to a display case holding a reconstructed pot from your monastery; in your hands you hold a copy of Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery into which you peer as into a relentless, unforgiving mirror that captures fragments of your image and offers them back to you kaleidoscopically as some sort of colorful but distorted whole. The Coptic Museum is run-down, ill-lit, dirty, and sad. You lay the

Nakhla prods the viewer to reflect on historical, spiritual, and underlying a theological message(s). We are challenged to “see” and to “think,” as well as to appreciate the spirituality of the colours and her art. Ms. Nakhla’s folkloric paintings offer us not only the opportunity to learn about this ancient art form, we are also presented with an artist who clearly had deep religious beliefs and who wanted to communicate her thoughts and spirituality and perhaps even pose theological questions. We are continually seeking to learn more about Ms. Nakhla. We hope that by exhibiting her works we will inspire artists to follow her suit to revive this ancient art and deepen spirituality this art form can offer the viewer. We are also searching to locate and acquire the eight remaining folkloric paintings of Marguerite Nakhla Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery: Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity , by Rebecca Krawiec. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 248. Cloth. $49.95. ISBN 0-19-512943-1.) Imagine that you were the archimandrite or abbot of a large monastery in late antique Egypt that included both male and female communities. Now imagine that, in a pre-computer age, you wrote letters to the female community. Imagine further that only thirteen of these letters (out of how many?) survived from your seventy-year abbacy. All of these letters are fragmentary, some of them extremely so, consisting of only a few lines. Imagine, to your chagrin, that all the surviving letter fragments deal only with conflicts and crises. Now imagine, to your horror, that a scholar 1600 years later has used these fragments to write a book reconstructing your "ideology," and that virtually all her evidence is based on a handful of shredded papyri.

Book Reviews

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

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