Recently I’ve travelled the road to Damascus, visiting parishes and speaking with Christians communities as I made my way home through a region at war. The conflict began during a research trip in Iraq and soon disrupted my planned return to studies in Cairo. The airspace closed, and the situation in Baghdad deteriorated rapidly. Though…
Trendy cafés and plush boutiques line the streets of Achrafieh, an upmarket neighbourhood where colourful Ottoman, French colonial, and art deco homes sit side by side near Beirut’s downtown district. The breeze carries the rattle of reconstruction from the damaged port area, while far overhead a surveillance drone sent from Lebanon’s southern neighbour buzzes relentlessly…
Today it is monkeys, not monks, that wander the cloisters of Toumliline, a former Benedictine monastery in the Middle Atlas mountains of Morocco. Perched on a hillside above the town of Azrou – about ninety minutes south of Fez – some twenty monks hailing from En-Calcat Abbey near Toulouse once called this place home. Arriving…