Peter Bistolarides, M.D.,
conference respondent, attended the University of Toronto, where he received his Doctor of Medicine and Master of Business Administration.  After completing his residence in general surgery and critical care, he went into private practice in Toronto. He has an active interest in medical ethics, health care policy, health care systems, and the interaction between theology and the healing professions. Dr. Bistolarides is a Diplomate of the American Board of Surgery, and a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Surgeons of Canada.   He is also a life member of the American College of Physician Executives. Currently on sabbatical, he attends Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, where he is completing his studies in the Master of Divinity program. He and his wife, Peggy, have been married for 23 years, and are the parents of five boys ranging in age from 8 to 21.  They are members of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Ann Arbor, MI, and St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in Weston, MA, where they currently reside.

John T. Chirban, Ph.D., Th.D.,
a 40th Anniversary Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, is also a clinical instructor at The Cambridge Health Alliance at Harvard Medical School, where he teaches courses in spirituality and psychiatry, and the integrative treatment of sexuality and sexual dysfunction. Dr. Chirban serves as professor of psychology and Chairman of the Department of Human Development at Hellenic College. He is also Director for the Institute of Medicine, Psychology, and Religion in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A licensed psychologist in Massachusetts and California, Dr. Chirban serves as Co-Director with his wife at Cambridge Counseling Associates, LLP,, a full-service practice in psychology. His current research examines the philosophy and religion of B. F. Skinner, drawing from extensive collaborative recordings spanning 25 years. His recent books include: True Coming of Age; Sickness or Sin? Spiritual Development and Differential Diagnosis; Raised in Glory; Interviewing in Depth: The Interactive-Relational Approach; and Personhood. He and his wife Sharon, a clinical-psychologist, live in Carlisle, Massachusetts with their three children Alexis Georgia, Anthony Thomas, and Ariana Maria.

Andrew Crislip, Ph.D.,
is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, in Honolulu, where he teaches courses in Biblical Studies, Early Christianity, and Theory and Method in Religious Studies. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2002. His research interests include Coptic and Greek papyrology, Egyptian magic and medicine, and Christian monasticism. He is especially interested in the intersection of ancient medical traditions with Christian ascetic theory and practice. Recent and forthcoming publications include “The Book of Jubilees in Coptic: An Early Christian Florilegium on the Family of Noah,” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 40 (2003); and “Sickness and Health in the Monasteries of Pachomius and Shenoute,” in Coptic Studies on the Threshold of a New Millennium, edited by M. Immerzeel and J. van der Vliet. He is also at work on a book on healing traditions in late antique monasticism.

The Monastic Health Care System and the Development of the Hospital in Late Antiquity
A deep concern with the medical, religious, and social aspects of illness runs throughout early monastic literature. A concern with illness and health, and indeed a focus on the body, is by no means unique in late antique ascetic literature, but is a common feature of late Roman philosophical and ethical belles-lettres. But in contrast to the medical obsession that so consumed members of the Roman aristocracy, monastic leaders wrestled less with the interpretation of sickness within their own bodies than with the treatment of the sick within society. Such an overriding concern with the care for the sick, and also with the social inclusion of the sick and disabled within the community, pervades monastic rules, letters, homilies, and biographies from the fourth and fifth centuries. These sources, from monasteries in Egypt, Cappadocia, Syria, Palestine, and the Latin West, provide a picture of the techniques and institutions—medical, religious, and social—by which sickness was treated in early Christian monasteries. In the early monastic health care system, monastics had access to inpatient hospital care and outpatient ambulatory care. Monastics were treated by doctors and nurses using the standard medical treatments of Greek and Egyptian medicine. They were offered material and emotional comfort in their time of need, and were exempted from their normal responsibilities of work, diet and prayer. Monastics were furthermore guaranteed social inclusion and freedom from ostracism, and guaranteed comfort and care in their old age. The care of sick monastics was an integral and innovative feature of monastic life. Why did such a health care system appear within the early monastic movement? The monastic health care system was a function of monasticism’s unique social organization, its structure and scale, and its isolation from the rest of society. That is, the monastic health care system was a systemic necessity, an unavoidable structural feature of the monastic system. In particular, we may understand the appearance of the monastic health care system as a necessary consequence of monasticism’s renunciation of traditional social bonds, especially the support network of the family. The innovative approaches to healing within early Christian monasticism would bear a significant influence on the development of the hospital in early Byzantium. This influence may be witnessed most clearly through Basil the Great’s hospital outside Caesarea. Through this “new city” of Christian charity all the necessities of life formerly provided within the cloister (including medical care and a range of non-medical charitable services, as well as an emphasis on the social inclusion of the sick) were now provided to non-monastic society at large.

 

Maria Evangelatou, Ph. D.,
earned her first degree in Archaeology, with specialization in Byzantine Art, in 1993, from the University of Ioannina, Greece. She then received a Diploma in History of Art from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and she studied Museology and Conservation of works of Art for two years at the Universitá Internazionale dell’Arte, Florence. Between 1997-2002 she earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Byzantine Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, under the supervision of Prof. Robin Cormack. Both of her dissertations were on the illustration of the ninth-century Byzantine marginal Psalters, their sources and layers of meaning. Between 2000-2003 she worked as curatorial assistant in the Manuscript Department of the Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens, where she also participated in the organization of two temporary exhibitions and in the planning of the new permanent exhibition of the Museum. Currently, she is a Byzantine Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, working on the publication of her thesis. Her scholarly interests are focused primarily on Byzantine manuscript illumination, with particular attention to the relationship of word and image and the use of iconographic and compositional devices to construct different layers of meaning; and symbolic aspects of Byzantine iconography, with particular attention to the relationship of ecclesiastical texts and the visual arts. She has published articles on the ninth-century Byzantine marginal psalters and on Marian iconography. One of her future projects is the publication of a monograph on the Sacra Parallela of Paris, a unique Byzantine illustrated florilegium of the ninth century.

Virtuous Soul, Healthy Body: the holistic concept of health in Byzantine representations of Christ’s healing miracles
The connection of illness to sin and of health to virtue is a frequently cited concept, with many different aspects, in the patristic literature of Byzantium. It originates from the Bible, especially the Gospel accounts of Christ’s healing miracles. In the relevant passages, the healing of a person is usually accompanied by the remission of his or her sins, giving the impression that the infirmity had resulted from the person’s previous sinfulness. In their homilies on the relevant miracles, the Fathers of the Church usually mention that the most important healing act performed by Christ on those occasions was aimed at the person’s soul rather than his or her body. Moreover, they regularly use words related to health or illness to describe the moral and spiritual state of a person, a group of people, or the Church as a whole. If somebody’s faith, belief, opinion, mind, behavior, etc. is described as healthy, it means it is Orthodox, moral, virtuous and the like; and if it is described as sick, it means it is heretical, immoral, sinful, etc. Moreover, evil men and especially heretics are frequently described as suffering from an infirmity, sickness or even fatal illness as a divine punishment for their immorality – just as people who have faith in God are frequently rewarded with a miraculous healing of their infirmity. The paper investigates how, in the Byzantine culture, these ideas were expressed not only in textual but also in visual form. The material used comprises a number of miniatures from the ninth-century marginal psalters (cod. 129 of the State Historical Museum in Moscow and cod. Paris.gr. 20) and the Sacra Parallela (cod. Paris. gr. 923). A number of iconographic and compositional peculiarities indicate that these miniatures were intended to emphasize the relation between body and soul, illness and sin, health and virtue, and that in some cases they were even meant to allude to the healing of a group of people or the whole Church from the illness of heresy. Consequently, we should be aware of the possibility that representations of Christ’s healing miracles might at times have been perceived by Byzantine viewers not only as visual narrations of the relevant Gospel episodes but as references to more general issues, pertinent to the moral and spiritual state of individual Christians or of the Church as a whole.

Reverend Nicholas T. Graff
is the Pastor of Saint John the Divine in Jacksonville, Florida, and the Executive Director of Saint Photios National Shrine in Saint Augustine, Florida.  He is a graduate of Hellenic College/Holy Cross School of Theology.  He did his D.Min. at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and his Clinical Pastoral Education, and Psychodrama Training at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland and Spring Grove State Psychiatric Hospital, also in Baltimore.  He has also completed Advanced Theological Summer Seminars at Christ's Church, Oxford University, He was ordained as deacon in 1984, by Archbishop Iakovos, and priest, in 1985 and was made Archimandrite in 1992 by His Grace, Bishop Philip of Atlanta, of blessed memory. He serves as member of the Metropolitan Council of Atlanta, and serves the Metropolis as Vicar. He is a member of the Archdiocese Council of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of Hellenic College/Holy Cross School of Theology. Father Graff is one of the founding members of the Orthodox Christian Association of Medicine, Psychology and Religion, and has been active since its inception in 1982.  He has served twice as National Conference Chairman, as well as hosting several regional and local conferences.  Fr. Niko currently serves as the President of the association.

Providing Healing in the Orthodox Christian Tradition Today
The Church of the 21st Century is called upon to be a prolific, creative, integrative, and holistic extension of Christ's own healing ministry.  Healing, in the Orthodox Christian Tradition, today, as always, is a collective expression of the Faith Community, anointed by the Grace of the Holy Spirit.  Clergy and laity, practitioners from all disciplines of the healing arts, working together to facilitate an environment in which Christ's healing Grace may flow.  This environ must be one of mutuality, fidelity and trust.  It affects all aspects of the human person: psychosomatic, psycho-social, psychosexual, and spiritual. His comments will attempt to provide a contemporary frame in which many of the historical and epistemological studies of this conference have so insightfully addressed. He hopes to give a practical account of the realities of ministry to the broken people of God, as it reflects Orthodox Christian Pastoral Theology; the theology of love and service.  He will challenge the audience to question some of our typologies and forms.  Issues concerning personhood, a problematically underdeveloped anthropology in the (Orthodox) Christian tradition, must be faced if the Church is to maintain any credible standing in what is being defined as the Post-Christian era.  Is man (woman), as image and likeness of God, compatible/incompatible with racism, sexism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, homophobia, elitism, nationalism, clericism?  Is the Church the champion over these evils, or is it their last bastion and haven? Lastly, he will comment on the true goals of the healer.  Christ healed.  He brought Lazarus back from the dead.  In time, they all died (again).  Physicians go to heroic ends to maintain life; to prolong life.  On one level, all healers are failures, because our efforts will eventually come to naught.  There must be more to be gained.  That gain is the experience of God's loving care, the feeling of God's unique compassion for us anultimately, that His Glory be manifest in the interpersonal fellowship of the community, engulfed in His Love.

Djordje N. Koldzic, M.D.,
is a research fellow at the Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School.  Dr. Koldzic works in the field of neuroimmunology concerning multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease.

Psychoneuroimmunology: has Byzantine holistic approach to medicine come a full circle?
The gap between western medicine and religion has been deepened within the last century by acceptance in medical practice of mechanistic-reductionist model with emphasis on technology. In spite of this trend, it should be noted that medicine originally developed in religious context and that medicine and religion have worked in a collaborative effort to promote healing for thousands of years. The “separation” of mind and body occurred only in the 1600’s -- prior to that, medicine, science, philosophy and spirituality were commonly considered aspects of the whole person. Recently, new integrative approaches have emerged within the western medical practice. This talk will introduce the audience to the concepts of mind-body medicine and psychoneuroimmunology and question whether insights offered by these newly-developing medical fields could be used to bridge the artificial gap made between medical sciences and spirituality.

Derek Krueger, Ph.D.,
a conference respondent, has recently been promoted to Professor and Head of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.  He received his Ph.D. from Princeton Unversity in 1991.  He is the author of Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius's Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) and Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East which will appear this October from the University of Pennsylvania Press, and articles on early Byzantine saints lives, asceticism, and hymnography.  His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University.

Kyriacos C. Markides, Ph.D.
is Professor of Sociology at the University of Maine. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, Boston University. Professor Markides has written several books about Christian mystics and healers. His latest work The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality (Doubleday/Image books, 2002) explores the spiritual and healing tradition of Eastern Orthodox Christianity as it has been preserved on the Holy Mountain of Athos.

Healers and miracle workers of Eastern Christianity
Based on a twenty-year field research with mystics, healers, spiritual elders, monks and hermits of Eastern Christianity Professor Markides will share some of his findings relating to healing phenomena and their implication for a deeper understanding of human nature and  the nature of Reality itself.

Timothy S. Miller, Ph.D.,
graduated from Haverford College in 1967 and received his Ph.D. in Medieval History at Catholic University in 1975. After working for a year at Dumbarton Oaks, he moved to Seattle, Washington, where he taught for three years in the History Department at the University of Washington. In 1982 he received a fellowship from The National Humanities Center to complete a study of Byzantine medical hospitals. The following year he joined the History faculty at Salisbury State University where he has taught for the past twenty years. Although Dr. Miller teaches undergraduate courses in Medieval Western Europe, the Italian Renaissance, and even the French Revolution, his field of research has remained focused on Byzantine history. He has written two monographs: one on the development of Byzantine medical hospitals and the other on the care of orphans in the Eastern Roman Empire. In addition to studying Byzantine philanthropic institutions, Dr. Miller has edited and translated “The Life of Saint Zotikos” by Constantine Akropolites, a hagiographical text, which for the first time reveals the presence of Khazar Jews in Constantinople. He has also written on many other subjects including the Western military order known as The Knights of Saint John or the Hospitallers.

Byzantine Hospitals
After publishing, Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire in 1985, Dr. Miller has been spending much effort in finding even stronger evidence in support of a position which, at first glance, seems opposed to the proposition of “Holistic Healings in Byzantium.” Because the conclusions of the above work sparked such stiff resistance from historians of medicine and from a few Byzantinists, he has searched for additional evidence to prove that Byzantine xenones were exclusively medical institutions to cure their patients, not to provide them with extended care and comfort. The exclusively medical character of these xenones also explains why they became the centers for training physicians in Constantinople. The evidence for a medical school at the Pantokrator comes from the Pantokrator Typikon and from an unedited poem of the anonymous Mangana Poet, which describes a senior doctor at the Pantokrator Xenon supervising two younger physicians who are finishing their practical training in medicine. A second example is the fifteenth-century Krales hospital where John Argyropoulos taught medicine and philosophy to both Greeks and Italians. Historians of medicine have no doubt found Byzantine sources difficult to interpret because they have been more familiar with Western Christian hospitals which were primarily institutions for caring, not curing. Very few hospitals in Latin Christendom had physicians who were permanently attached to these institutions. The rules for Latin hospitals emphasize primarily religious approaches to treating the sick. Most required that upon admission, the patients confess their sins to the resident priest. Latin hospitals placed patient beds so that the sick could see the chapel altar and attend the Divine Liturgy. They also required a weekly rite of aspersion with holy water. Such religious regulations form a major part of the rules of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, the most advanced of Western hospitals.

Deacon Markos Nickolas,
a conference respondent, is a Ph.D. Candidate in Pastoral Psychology at Boston University where he lectures in Religion and Culture. His dissertation will study the relationship between membership in a faith community and psycho-spiritual well-being. Currently the Holy Cross field education instructor for Hospital Ministry, Markos was ordained to the diaconate in the Greek Orthodox Church in 2000. He and his wife, Zoe, are the grateful parents of newborn identical twin girls and a 4 year old daughter, Theodora.

Jeffrey Rediger, M.D., M.Div.,
is medical director of the Institute for Psychological & Spiritual Development, medical director at McLean Hospital Southeast, and an instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He has a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and publishes in the fields of medicine, psychiatry and spirituality.

Communicating the Healing Message of Orthodox Christianity
The ontology underlying Orthodox Christianity raises difficult questions for western worldviews and the materialist emphasis that they typically assume.  To that end, recent results from interviews with people who have visited a spiritual healer in Brazil will be summarized, with special emphasis on those findings that are most consistent with historical Orthodox Christianity.  Objective data, such as lab tests, photos and radiological exams will be discussed as they are available.  Orthodox teachings will be examined for their teaching about the relationship of consciousness to the material world, and implications will be considered.

Susan Sered, Ph.D.,
is the research director of the Religion, Health and Healing Initiative at Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions, and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Her work spans the fields of medical anthropology, religious studies, and gender studies. Among her many projects, Sered has explored the religious worldviews and ritual repertoires of Kurdish, Yemenite and North African Jewish women in Israel, and has conducted fieldwork in Okinawa (Japan) – the only contemporary society in which women lead the mainstream religion. More recently, she has turned her attention to the growing American Jewish healing movement.

James Skedros, Ph.D.,
a conference respondent, is Associate Professor of Early Christianity and Byzantine History at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, Brookline, MA, where from 1998 to 2002 he served as acting Dean.  A graduate of Holy Cross, Dr. Skedros received his Th.D. from Harvard Divinity School in the History of Christianity.  From 1996 to 1998 he was Assistant Professor of Orthodox Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.  His research areas include popular religious practices in Late Antiquity, early Christian and Byzantine hagiography, pilgrimage, and Christian and Muslim relations.  As a Fulbright Scholar, he has conducted field and archaeological research in Thessaloniki, Greece related to the veneration of St. Demetrios. He lives in Fitchburg, MA with his wife Stephanie and their three children Anna, Francesca, and Rebecca.

Alice-Mary Talbot, Ph.D.
is a philologist and historian with particular interest in medieval Greek saints' lives, miracle accounts, and monastic foundation documents.  After earning a B.A. in Classics from Radcliffe College, she studied Byzantine and Ottoman History at Columbia University, receiving a Ph.D. in 1970.  She then taught at several colleges in or near Cleveland, including Hiram College, Oberlin College and Case Western Reserve University. Most of her professional career has been spent at Dumbarton Oaks, where she worked from 1984-1991 as Executive Director of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, and from 1991-1997 as co-director of the Dumbarton Oaks Hagiography Database project.  Since 1997 she has been serving as Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, where she is also general editor of a new series of Byzantine saints' lives in annotated English translations. She was the co-founder of the annual North American Byzantine Studies Conference, is a past president of the U.S. National Committee for Byzantine Studies, and is a councilor of the Medieval Academy of America. Her books include The Correspondence of the Patriarch Athanasius I (1975), Faith Healing in Late Byzantium: The Posthumous Miracles of the Patriarch Athanasios I of Constantinople by Theoktistos the Stoudite (1983), and Women and Religious Life in Byzantium (2001).  Her annotated translation of the history of Leo the Deacon (co-authored with Denis Sullivan) is now in press at Dumbarton Oaks. Dr. Talbot is currently preparing a translation of a vita of St. Athanasios of Athos, and is also working on a new critical edition of a 14th-c. account of the miracles performed at the Zoodochos Pege shrine in Constantinople.

Faith Healing in Byzantium
Byzantine men and women suffered from many of the same afflictions as those of the modern period, and from other scourges as well, such as leprosy, smallpox and dropsy, that have virtually been eliminated in the 21st century.  When they were injured or fell ill, they could seek healing from a variety of sources, their choice depending to some extent on their abode and social class.  Among their options were hospitals or physicians that practiced medicine in the Greco-Roman tradition, magic, traditional herbal medicine, and faith healing. Those who sought miraculous cures most often visited shrines that housed the relics or holy icon of a saint or other sacred personage, or a healing spring, or in rarer cases approached a living holy man with the charismatic gift of curing the afflicted. Pilgrims to healing shrines were most often people who lived in the immediate geographic region, although hagiographic texts attest to journeys of up to several hundred miles in search of a miraculous cure.  The afflicted visitors to the shrine found healing in manifold ways, but most often from touching or kissing the saint's reliquary, from sleeping in the vicinity of the holy relics (the practice of incubation), and from drinking or anointing themselves with the oil from the lamp that hung over a saint's tomb. Drinking the sacred water most often cured visitors to holy springs, but sometimes they poured it over themselves, bathed in it, or made a mud plaster from a combination of the holy water and the earth near the shrine. Those who approached holy men or women were usually healed when the saintly personage laid his hands upon them in blessing, made the sign of the cross over them, or prayed on their behalf. Accounts of healing miracles often stress the element of personal faith, that is, a pilgrim would be healed only if he or she believed fervently in the power of the relics or living holy man.  Some miracle accounts also make a connection between correct belief and moral purity and wellness; heretics were stricken with dreaded diseases and recovered only upon the adoption of orthodox belief.  In other instances individuals were healed of afflictions, but suffered relapses if they reverted to an immoral way of life.

Reverend Nicholas Triantafilou,
a conference respondent, currently serves as President of Hellenic College and Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. Prior to holding this position, Rev. Triantifilou held administrative positions in various dioceses throughout the country. He received his B.A. in Theology from Holy Cross and his M.A., also in Theology, from St. Thomas University in Houston, TX. He is a member of numerous committees and boards and was co-founder of the Annunciation Orthodox School in Houston, TX.