Jerusalem
and the Middle East
Church Association

Editorial

Article

Obituaries

While on holiday, Ian Smith read William Dalrymple’s ‘From the Holy Mountain’ and was inspired to make his own journey around the Middle East, to find out how present day Christians are coping. Over three months, he visited Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Israel/Palestine and Lebanon, finishing up in Turkey. He spent Orthodox Easter in Jerusalem, caught up in the excitement of the Holy Fire in the Holy Sepulchre. He heard a hard-hitting sermon from Pope Shenouda in Egypt, and took a Turkish bath in Nablus.

Readers of ‘Bible Lands’ will spot familiar names. Kamal Farrar, an Anglican priest, gave Ian hospitality in Jordan, and he met Brother Andrew of the Holy Land Institute for the Deaf. In Damascus, Stephen Wright was his guide, introducing him to expatriate ministry, including care for Sudanese refugees. Colin Chapman at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut welcomed him.

Ian Smith visited a wide variety of churches and monasteries, and also talked with individual Christians in taxis and buses and on planes. Right across the region he met Christians who took their faith seriously at a deep level, in spite of poverty and discrimination in many cases, rejecting the option of leaving the region to live easier lives in the West.

A LITTLE PIECE OF GROUND By Elizabeth Laird, paperback, published by Macmillan Children’s Books at £4.99. ISBN 0-330-43743-7

Michael Morpurgo, Children’s Laureate, writes:

No one but Elizabeth Laird could have written this book. She has lived in the Middle East. She knows it, feels it, loves it, grieves for it and hopes for it. Read ‘A Little Piece of Ground’ and we know what it is to feel oppressed, to feel fear every day. And we should know it, for this is how much of the world lives.

We are apt to see events in Palestine and Israel as television dramas; violent and repetitive. We are distant from it. But in this book we are taken into Ramallah, we live there, no longer mere observers, but involved as we should be. A fine book, and a daring book.

(A book for older children, which this adult was much moved by – Editor)