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 ...

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, ...

You get asked some pretty strange things when you speak the language of Jesus. The calls come to my father’s office at UCLA several times a year, often around Christmas or Easter. “Professor Yona ...

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, ...

Continuing his series of ""conversations"" in spiritual theology, prolific author, pastor and theologian Eugene H. Peterson (most familiar for his Bible paraphrase The Message) provides an intimate ...

A nun lights candles in the Syrian village of Maalula, in of the world's oldest Christian settlements - Copyright AFP VALERIE BAERISWYL A nun lights candles in the ...