St. Nersess Featured in Anthropology Article

The online academic forum/blog of the Society for Cultural Anthropology published an article written by Dr. Christopher Sheklian, Director at the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center and member of the St. Nersess faculty. The article is called “Communion in Quarantine: How Liturgical Churches Celebrated Easter.” It featured Dr. Sheklian’s St. Nersess virtual course for students and clergy and the seminary’s Good Friday service.  

“The premier academic association of anthropologists put out a call for pieces for an edited collection of essays to ‘provide a forum for early observations and reflections on the pandemic as it unfolds’,” commented Dr. Sheklian.   

“… like Armenian Orthodox Christians, for whom liturgy is not merely a gathering of individual believers but an active partaking in Holy Communion that therefore stitches together the Church as such, there are fundamental theological concerns over the inability to physically come together for robust sacramental life,” exclaims Sheklian in an excerpt from the article. “Though the ecclesial conundrums continue, for Armenian Apostolic Christians, alongside all Christians with a strong liturgical tradition, Holy Week and Easter has gone on in the midst of the pandemic, albeit with ad hoc, imaginative alternative liturgical celebrations,” concludes the article.  

To read the entire article, go to https://culanth.org/fieldsights/communion-in-quarantine.