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For two decades now, the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative has been engaged in the editing, translation, and publication of important texts from the golden age of the Islamic world, including mystical, theological, philosophical, and medical works by Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike. Working with high-caliber scholars from around the world, we have published a total of over thirty-five volumes in four different series: the Islamic Translation Series, Eastern Christian Texts, the Library of Judeo-Arabic Literature, and the Medical Works of Moses Maimonides.These texts represent some of the most important intellectual contributions of their time and continue to be in demand, year after year, as the classics that they are. Also as intended, they have helped to build bridges of friendship and mutual understanding between diverse cultures and faith communities at a time in history when the need was greater than ever. Myriad are the stories of how relationships have been forged and strengthened at both personal and institutional levels through the publications of these series.As the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship continues to grow and evolve under the inspired guidance of our director, our advisory board, and the administration of Brigham Young University, we’ve begun to focus our efforts less on publication and more on the gathering and nurturing of disciple scholars—women and men with important academic projects to pursue in the field of religion who desire to undertake their work within the BYU and Maxwell Institute environment; a place where faith and intellect are nurtured in tandem. Within this recalibrated environment where resources are finite, the question of how to continue the production of the valuable, ambitious, and demanding projects of the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative has been an important consideration to which we have given diligent attention. In addition, we’ve recognized for some time the desirability of making METI titles available digitally as this is a cost effective way to share knowledge around the globe with individuals and institutions that might not have the space or the means to acquire and preserve physical books.Left to right: Brill representatives Joed Elich and Loes Schouten; Maxwell Institute representatives Morgan Davis and Spencer Fluhman

I'm excited to announce the publication of the fifth and final volume of medical aphorisms by the great Medieval Jewish physician and theologian Moses Maimonides, translated from the Arabic by Gerrit Bos, a world authority on Maimonides.Moses Maimonides is among the most celebrated rabbis in the history of Judaism and the author of works on many subjects. Born in 1138 in Córdoba, Spain, Maimonides eventually settled in Egypt, where he practiced medicine until his death in 1204.This fifth and final volume of the critical edition of Moses Maimonides’ Medical Aphorisms covers treatises 22–25. An additional volume of indexes and glossaries to all of Maimonides’ medical aphorisms is also in the works.Unlike today, where doctors usually specialize in a particular branch of medicine, physicians in the Medieval world were expected to master the full array of medical knowledge at the time. In an effort to make that daunting task achievable, some physicians authored compendia of medical information which could be consulted and committed to memory. Maimonides's collection of aphorisms—short sayings that come quickly to their point—represent such an effort. Each one could fit on a three-by-five card, as it were, and be grouped together with other aphorisms dealing with related topics.This is a highly specialized volume that will be of interest primarily to scholars of the history of medicine and of ideas. But to give a flavor of what it contains, I thought it might be fun to list the main topics of each section of the aphorisms (treatises) in this book, followed by a sample aphorism or two.The central subjects of treatise 22 are the specific properties of medicines. These are fairly moderate examples of the medicinal recipes in this volume. Still, if you are eating, you may want to finish before continuing: Sheep excrement, dried and kneaded with vinegar, heals warts, fleshy excrescences, ulcers that develop from burning with fire, and shingles in which one has the sensation of crawling ants.If one burns river crabs alive in a red copper pot, takes one part of their ashes, half a part of great yellow gentian , and one tenth of frankincense , and from this sprinkles a large spoonful on water and gives it to someone bitten by a dog, it is of amazing benefit. Treatise 23 deals with the differences between well-known diseases and explains technical terms: The illness that occurs in all joints is called “arthritis”; this very illness is called “ischias” if it occurs in the hip joint only and “podagra” if it occurs in the feet. If podagra becomes chronic and persists for a long time, the illness spreads into all joints. In all these much chyme develops in the joints and spreads to the nerves surrounding them. The chyme that mostly flows in the case of arthritis is that which is called “crude.” Medical curiosities and rare occurrences comprise treatise 24: It is related that the queen of Egypt killed herself by letting a viper free on her breast. and she died immediately. The reason she did so was because another king had defeated her and usurped the land that was in her possession. Says Galen: I saw with my own eyes in Alexandria how fast this viper kills . For when the judge in that city sentences a prominent person to death, they bring this viper and let her bite him in the chest and he dies immediately. Once a plague erupted from the borders of Ethiopia to Greece. Hippocrates acted skillfully and saved the inhabitants of his city by instructing them to ignite a fire around the city and large quantities of wood and other things, namely, blossoms and leaves of plants and fragrant trees. He also told them to put on the firebrand many spices and odiferous oils. When they did so, they were saved from the death they were so close to. The 25th treatise is by far the longest in this volume. It contains Maimonides’ critical assessment of a number of passages in the vast medical corpus of Galen, one of the most influential physicians of the ancient world: makes the following statement, and these are his words: The language of the Greek is the most pleasant of all languages and the most universal for all people with logic, the most eloquent and most human. For if you pay attention to the pronunciation of the words in the languages of other peoples, you will certainly discern that some of them are very much like the grunting of pigs, others resemble the croaking of frogs, and yet others resemble the sound produced by the green woodpecker. Then you will also find that originate in an ugly way in the movements of the tongue, lips, and entire mouth….Says Moses: Al-Rāzī and others have cast doubt on these words of Galen. The thrust of their objection is that he makes the Greek language into a unique one spoken by men and regards all the other languages as ugly ones. It is well known that the languages are conventional and that every language is ugly, hard, and obscure for someone who does not know it and who has not been raised with it. Maimonides was an independent and critical physician who tried to eradicate prejudices and dogmas in medicine, even if their source was a physician as venerated as Galen. This fifth volume of his aphorisms bears witness to this critical attitude as well as to the breadth of his training.This volume, and all of the published translations from this series of the medical works of Maimonides, is published by Brigham Young University Press and distributed world-wide by the University of Chicago Press. ***** D. Morgan Davis has been affiliated with the Maxwell Institute's Middle Eastern Texts Initiative since its launch in 1993 and became the project’s director in 2010. He holds a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University, an MA in history from the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD (2005) in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Utah.

It is my pleasure to announce the publication of On This Day: The Armenian Church Synaxarion; March by Edward G. Mathews Jr. This is the third in a proposed twelve volume series that offers a complete English translation of an important spiritual work from the Armenian Church.The meaning of the word “synaxarion” in the title might stump even the most seasoned student of early Christianity. Fortunately, Professor Robin Darling Young of The Catholic University of America provided an excellent definition in a recent review of the first volume of this work: “The term synaxarion relates to the word synaxis, itself a term for a liturgical assembly, and usually used to refer to a monastic context. It is often a synonym for a Eucharistic gathering. A synaxarion, however, is a specific kind of book used in those monastic assemblies—a collection of brief biographies of martyrs and saints, organized by successive days in the calendar year, in a repeating yearly cycle. Each day of the year features one or more saint’s life so that a monastic assembly would hear about one or more holy person each year on the same day.” ((Robin Darling Young, “Mathews, Edward G., Jr. On this Day: The Armenian Church Synaxarion; January.” Journal of Religions 96.2 (2016): 285-287, citing from p. 285.)) Reading aloud from this library of saints’ lives formed an important part in the moral and spiritual formation of early Christian ascetics, since these “martyrs and saints give examples of the imitation of Christ for later readers to follow. Indeed, the monastic compilers of the volume intended the lives to be edifying models of faithfulness in various times and places, and as they were read aloud in the monastic gathering every day in the yearly cycle, they would have become very familiar to monks over the course of their own lifetimes.” ((Young, “Mathews,” 286.))Thus the repetition of the liturgical year provided repeated opportunities to remember, be taught by, and emulate each of the lives read in the Synaxarion.These monastic collections of saints’ lives are known in and moved between all the languages of ancient Christianity. As the collections of lives migrated from one language to another, they grew—absorbing local saints and martyrs in the process—creating a truly ecumenical library of holy men and women. I find it particularly interesting that the Synaxarion also collects models of virtue from the Old and New Testaments, often in little-known biographical sketches. In March, for example, we read the lives of the Prophet Amos (2nd), the Prophets Ezekiel and Ezra (13th), and Melchizedek (25th).We hear so little about Melchizedek in the Bible (Gen 14:18-20; Ps. 110:4; Heb. 7:1-4), so how do we end up with a life of Melchizedek in the Armenian Synaxarion?This Armenian life of Melchizedek is actually a translation from a Greek life of Melchizedek composed in the fourth of fifth century A.D., which is attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria in some manuscripts. ((The story is translated and studied by the emeritus BYU professor Stephen E. Robinson in, “The Apocryphal Story of Melchizedek.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 18.1 (1987): 26-39. For Melchizedek in LDS tradition see, John W. Welch, “The Melchizedek Material in Alma 13:13-19.” In By Study and Also by Faith, ed. J. Lundquist and S. Ricks, Vol. 2, pp. 238-72. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1990.)) It describes two episodes in the life of Melchizedek.The first recounts how Melchizedek became a follower of the God who made heaven and earth, rather than continuing to worship the idols of his fathers. There are echoes of the ancient traditions of the early life of Abraham here. ((See, John A. Tvedtnes, Brian M. Hauglid, and John Gee, Traditions about the Early Life of Abraham. Provo: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 2001.)) When Melchizedek goes up to Mount Tabor to pray for his brother, who is about to be sacrificed by his father, the whole city of Salem is swallowed up in the earth, which is meant to be an explanation for how Melchizedek was “Without father, without mother” (Heb. 7:1).The second episode begins with Melchizedek seeking refuge upon Mount Tabor after the destruction of his family and city. He lives there as a holy man for seven years, at which time Abraham is instructed by God to go up to Mount Tabor and seek out Melchizedek, who is a “priest of God most high,” in order to receive a blessing from him. This strange and lovely story of Melchizedek enjoyed wide appeal in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, being translated not only into Armenian, but also Arabic, Coptic, Georgian, Romanian, Slavonic and Syriac. ((On the latter see, Sergey Minov, “Reception of the Greek Story of Melchizedek in Syriac Christian Tradition.” Journal for the Study of Pseudepigrapha 26.2 (2016): 108-143.)) It forms part of a large and interesting complex of traditions about Melchizedek that existed in early Jewish, Christian and Islamic sources. These stories help explain, and indeed demonstrate, the remark in the Epistle to the Hebrews, “Now consider how great this man was” (Heb. 7:1).This story of Melchizedek is just one of the hundreds of edifying and intriguing stories of saints and martyrs that adorn the pages of the The Armenian Church Synaxarion! *****Kristian Heal received a bachelor’s degree in Jewish history and Hebrew from University College, London, and a Master of Studies in Syriac studies from Oxford University. He received a Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Birmingham. He joined the staff of the Maxwell Institute as a research scholar in 2000. Since 2004 he’s served as the Director of the Center for the Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts.

The Middle Eastern Texts Initiative recently rolled out another volume of On This Day. The month of March is now available.On This Day (translated from the Armenian “Yaysmawurk‘”) is a compilation of stories about venerable Christians saints and martyrs from days gone by. The collection was part of the great and varied Armenian liturgical tradition from the turn of the first millennium. The first Yaysmawurk‘ was translated from an existing Greek liturgical collection (the Synaxarion, “where the lives are all collected”). Armenian Christians adopted traditional stories and added their own, ultimately creating multiple versions of the Synaxarion as the culmination of a long and steady development of what is today called the cult of the saints.When we’re finished, there will be series of twelve Armenian-English editions—the first such editions ever published—one for each month of the year.These readings are ideal for personal devotional use or as a valuable resource for anyone interested in religious saints. You also might enjoy this episode of the Maxwell Institute Podcast. It’s a fascinating discussion about martyrdom.On This Day is part of the Maxwell Institute’s Early Christian Texts series.

This month, the Maxwell Institute’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative inaugurates a new series called the Library of Judeo-Arabic Literature. We’re very pleased to announce the first title in the series is now available: Twenty Chapters, by Dawud al-Muqammas, translated by Sarah Stroumsa. Stroumsa is the Alice and Jack Ormut Professor of Arabic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We’ve invited her to answer a few questions to introduce you to the new book and series. Dr. Stroumsa, your translation of Twenty Chapters is the first publication in the Library of Judeo-Arabic Literature. What is Judeo-Arabic?Sarah Stroumsa

The Maxwell Institute wishes to thank David Calabro for his important contributions since joining our team in 2013. Calabro helped edit Arabic and Hebrew material in our Middle Eastern Text Initiative publications including the Medical Works of Moses Maimonides. Among other projects, he also assisted with Kristian Heal’s revised digital version of the Compendious Syriac Dictionary and helped Brian Hauglid on studies in the intertextuality of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian narratives of biblical prophets, focusing on an unpublished manuscript of the Book of the Beginning by Ishaq ibn Bishr.Calabro is leaving us to take a two-year full-time postdoctoral fellowship at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, the largest repository of digitized Eastern Christian manuscripts in the world. The HMML is located at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. We’ll miss his keen intellect and, even more, his kind and humble presence at the Institute. We wish him all the best as he assists HMML with online cataloging of unpublished Eastern Christian manuscripts in Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic.By making their ancient manuscripts more available to scholars worldwide, Calabro continues working in the spirit of the Maxwell Institute’s own mission as well.

I'm very pleased to announce the appearance of an important new title in our Eastern Christian Texts series. Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq on His Galen Translations is the first Arabic work to appear in this series since our inaugural volume in 2002 (other titles have appeared in Syriac and Armenian). Edited and translated with consummate erudition by John C. Lamoreaux, an associate professor in the department of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University, this title offers crucial information about a pivotal period in Arabic-Islamic civilization.Galen of Pergamon (129–216 CE) was one of the most prolific and important medical writers of the Greco-Roman world. Regarded as the most authoritative physician of his day, his work found new interest centuries later among the newly ascendant Arab empire, even as Greek Byzantium slid into decline. As Lamoreaux puts it in his introduction to this volume: 'During the ninth and tenth centuries, scholars in the lands of Islam fell under the thrall of the philosophy and science of Greece. Their fascination with the works of the ancients led to the translation into Arabic of hundreds upon hundreds of texts: works by Aristotle and his commentators, Hippocrates and Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy, and many others. So comprehensive was the translation movement that it has been compared both in scope and consequence to the European Renaissance. Very nearly all of the surviving nonliterary works of Greece found themselves rendered into Arabic over the course of these centuries. Many works, now lost in their original, were thus preserved in Arabic.' Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq was a leading figure in this translation movement, and his greatest contribution might be his translations of Galen, because for the next several centuries Galen’s stature only grew as his works continued to circulate—now in the Arabic and Syriac versions of Ḥunayn. Not only did these translations extend the life of Galen’s work into the eleventh century when they were translated yet again, this time into Latin, but they formed a foundation of knowledge upon which other medical practitioners built in the Arabic tradition. One such successor to Galen was Moses Maimonides, the Jewish rabbi and physician at the court of Saladdin during the twelfth century. He drew critically upon the Arabic versions of Galen in all of his own medical writings, which are also being collated and translated into English by Gerrit Bos and published in full in a separate series within the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative here at the Maxwell Institute.This treatise by Ḥunayn’s presents his own accounting of the works of Galen that he translated or supervised the translation of, and furnishes historians of science and culture much valuable information about how these translations were produced, what they contained, and who sponsored them. Pergamon, Galen's place of origin. Photographed by Morgan Davis.The story of this treatise is also a nice example of how members of all three of the great monotheistic traditions participated in the intellectual life of the Middle Ages: Ḥunayn was a Christian from the Church of the East who both translated and oversaw the work of other Christian and Jewish translators, all funded by Christian and Muslim Arabs, and their translations in turn came to form the basis of the work of later Jewish, Christian, and Muslim physicians. It is sometimes surprising in our highly divisive political environment to find these ancient examples of cooperation across sectarian and religious divides. But such was the case, as is well attested by this volume. Everybody bleeds; everyone needs healing and relief from suffering, no matter their creed, no matter their kin.But Galen and Ḥunayn his translator dealt with more than medicine. The latter part of this catalog mentions works of philosophy—including commentaries on Plato and Aristotle—as well as linguistics and grammar. In all, some 129 works of Galen are mentioned, as detailed by Lamoreaux in one of several appendices to this volume. Another appendix contains a summary of what is known about each of the patrons that Ḥunayn mentions, providing scholars with an invaluable resource for understanding the social context for this remarkable period in the intellectual history of the Islamicate world. A further appendix by Grigory Kessel details all known extant Syriac translations of Galen.Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq on His Galen Translations ($49.95) is published under the Brigham Young University Press imprint and is distributed world-wide by the University of Chicago Press. It is also available through major on-line retailers like Amazon.

I’m pleased to announce the publication of a fourth volume of medical aphorisms by the eminent medieval physician and Jewish theologian Moses Maimonides (1138–1204). Maimonides, like every medical practitioner of his time, studied the works of Galen, the Greco-Roman physician of the second century. Maimonides condensed much of Galen’s medical advice into the collection of aphorisms of which this volume is just one part.One of the most fascinating things about Maimonides’s work is that he was heavily indebted to earlier medical scholars—quoting from the works of ancient and medieval physicians like Ibn Wafid, Ibn Sina, and Marwan ibn Janah for much of his material—but as a doctor in his own right he didn’t simply repeat after them. He critically engaged with them. When he disagreed with their prescriptions, he said so and offered his own advice on topics including women’s diseases, the regimen of health in general, physical exercise, bathing, foods and beverages and their consumption, and drugs, all of which are addressed in this volume.Once again, Gerrit Bos, the Dutch-born scholar and leading authority on the medical writings of Maimonides, has generated a critical edition of the Arabic text which is paired with his own lucid English translation on facing pages. At the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, Angela Barrionuevo once again oversaw the major aspects of production for this volume with help from Muhammad S. Eissa, Felix Hedderich, Sandra Thorne, and Don L. Brugger. Special mention should be made of David Calabro who painstakingly reviewed and revised an index of over 260 plants and plant products mentioned in the treatises. And thanks also to Andrew Heiss for his beautiful work with the typesetting.Maimonides, Medical Aphorisms: Treatises 16–21 is published by Brigham Young University Press and distributed worldwide by the University of Chicago Press. It is available through our website and through major online book retailers. ***** D. Morgan Davis has been affiliated with the Maxwell Institute’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative since its launch in 1993 and became the project’s director in 2010. He holds a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Brigham Young University, an MA in history from the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD (2005) in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Utah.

The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religions Scholarship seeks to build bridges of understanding among people of all faiths. One of the most important ways we have been fulfilling that mandate since the Institute’s founding is through the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative (METI). I have had the honor of being a part of this project since its very first publications nearly twenty years ago and now I serve as its director.

Rysa King, who helped with set-up, poses in front of our booth at the Parliament of the World's Religions'BYU? Really? Why?'That was the most common question I heard while sitting at the Maxwell Institute's exhibit booth during last week's Parliament of the World's Religions. It was usually asked with an astonished smile. At this historic gathering of people from 80 countries and 50 religions, we thought it would be best to showcase our Middle Eastern Texts Initiative. Our booth featured a banner and posters describing the series and examples of our dual-language translations of books by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Representatives of all three traditions, and many more, stopped to talk about it, many seemed surprised when they saw 'BYU' alongside 'METI.'There were several ways I answered the question depending on what level of interest I could gauge from the questioner. My simplest response was to gesture to the Maxwell Institute banner which includes a quote from Doctrine & Covenants 88:118 which says: 'And as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.' Latter-day Saints believe God cares for all of humanity and has distributed knowledge, truth, and wisdom throughout the earth now as in the past. It's true that our translations serve the academy by providing scholars access to works of late antiquity. But they also preserve the religious and intellectual history of religious people and provide contemporary believers with a greater understanding of their heritage.When the first volume of METI's Islamic Translation Series was published back in 1998, Elder Neal A. Maxwell offered this LDS perspective to a gathering which included a number of Islamic diplomats and representatives: 'Light and truth need no visas to make their way in the world. Light and truth need no passport for identification. Light and truth come from God. We celebrate Him and what He has done.' From left to right: Elder Neal A. Maxwell; Ambassador Marwan Muasher of Jordan; Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) and his wife, Landra; Elder Merrill J. Bateman, then president of BYU; and Daniel C. Peterson, founding editor of METI.Many of the reasons BYU's Maxwell Institute invests so much labor, time, and money into METI were expressed during that 1998 event. Former BYU President Merrill J. Bateman cited BYU's unofficial motto 'The World Is Our Campus,' noting that METI represents BYU's 'major commitment to international studies and global understanding.' ((See Kathryn Baer, 'BYU translates, publishes Islamic text,' Church News, Feb. 14, 1998.)) That commitment has only intensified at BYU, and METI has continued to grow over the past 17 years with the encouragement of BYU administration. Founding editor Daniel C. Peterson's words are as true today as they were in 1998, and they've become even more urgent considering the events of September 11, 2001 and the rise of western Islamophobia: 'Among the things most needed to increase Western appreciation and understanding of Islam are competent, trustworthy, readily available translations of Islamic texts.' ((Ibid.)) Less than ten years after that historic publication, the Maxwell Institute was founded to bring a variety of initiatives—METI included—under its umbrella. Under the direction of D. Morgan Davis, METI continues to produce competent, trustworthy, readily available translations of Islamic texts, and also texts from Christian and Jewish traditions.For the past nine years the Maxwell Institute has focused on producing outstanding scholarship for Latter-day Saints; it's always been about more than the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies or the Mormon Studies Review. As our mission statement indicates, we undertake scholarly studies of a variety of religious traditions and texts 'in order to deepen understanding and nurture discipleship among Latter-day Saints and to promote mutual respect and goodwill among people of all faiths.' By looking at many religious texts—worthwhile in their own right—we come to understand other faiths better, as well as our own. We seek wisdom from the best books. We hope to build peace and enlightenment.It was a real blessing for me to encounter so many Christians, Jews, and Muslims (not to mention people of many other faiths besides) who stopped at our booth to express wonder and appreciation for the texts the Institute works diligently to produce. I saw attitudes toward BYU and the Church lighten with gratitude. Brian Hauglid, director of our Willes Center for Book of Mormon Studies, described one particularly poignant moment. As he sat tending the booth a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim imam each approached at the same moment to look at our offerings. I wish I could have seen it. I imagine them standing side by side, one looking through On Rules by Moses Maimonides, the other at Al-Ghazali's Niche of Lights. Brian enjoyed some interfaith discussion with both of them there at the Institute's booth. I hope you can appreciate the significance of such a peaceful moment considering all of the ongoing international turmoil. ((In recent years we've seem the emergence of groups promoting gatherings of rabbis and imams across the United States. See Lauren Markoe, 'Can Jews and Muslims get along? 60 imams and rabbis meet in Washington to try,' Religion News Service, November 24, 2014.))Speaking of Maimonides, volume four of his Medical Aphorisms is scheduled for release in our Middle Eastern Texts Initiative this December. More information is forthcoming.

Al-Ghazali is one of the most important Islamic thinkers of any generation since the Prophet Muhammad first brought the revelations of the Qur’an in the seventh century. A renowned jurist, theologian, and mystic, he penned one of the most influential texts of living the faith of Islam with proper intention as well as action—the Revival of the Religious Sciences. He also wrote a very influential critique of the Aristotelian-influenced philosophy of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and his predecessor al-Farabi. That work, The Incoherence of the Philosophers,translated by the late Michael E. Marmura, an eminent scholar of Arabic philosophy, was the very first text we produced in our Islamic Translation Series (the first edition appeared in 1997) and remains one of the most in-demand titles in our catalogue.

Next week our Eastern Christian Texts series is releasing its third title—a splendid translation of an Armenian Christian work called On This Day, a calendrical compilation of Christian saints and events. This special guest post is from Dr. Adam Carter McCollum of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in Collegeville, Minnesota. He joins us to celebrate the Maxwell Institute’s latest publication, set to appear on October 15. —BHodges

Eastern Christianity is a rich and diverse spiritual home for millions of believers worldwide, but it receives much less academic attention than its Western Christian cousins. Why? There are many reasons, but two seem particularly relevant and remediable: a lack of accessible and reliable texts from the tradition, as well as the remoteness of the texts’ source languages. The Maxwell Institute’s Eastern Christian Texts series offers to remedy both of these problems at once by publishing reliable English-language translations alongside the original-language texts.

Mullā Ṣadrā (c. 1572–1640) is one of the most prominent figures of later Islamic philosophy and among the most important philosophers of Safavid Persia. He presented a unified and integrated vision of reality at every ontological level—from God, to the universe, to the human state—that made the most of Islam’s native commitment to absolute monotheism. His school of thought drew from preceding philosophical, mystical, and theological traditions, integrating aspects of them into a new synthesis that Ṣadrā called al-ḥikmat al-mutaʿāliyah—”metaphysical philosophy” or “transcendent wisdom.”

Moses Maimonides (1137/8-1204) has been recognized as “the most influential Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages.” ((As an age-old aphorism puts it: “From Moses to Moses, there arose none like Moses.” See Herbert A. Davidson’s assessment in Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 302.)) He sought to master rabbinic law and to integrate it with the best philosophical thinking of his time—a goal that resulted in several of the most important written works in Jewish history. He also dedicated a great deal of time to the study and practice of medicine, authoring ten known texts dealing with the health of the human body. ((Each of the ten, in addition to two additional works thought to be incorrectly attributed to Maimonides, is discussed in Davidson, 429–83.)) The recent discovery of a long-forgotten treatise brings that total to eleven. The Neal A. Maxwell Institute is excited to announce the publication of On Rules Regarding the Practical Part of the Medical Art, the latest volume in our Medical Works of Moses Maimonides series. About a decade ago, the foremost biographer of Maimonides noted that all ten of the well-attested medical works had been translated (at least in part) into English, adding that “the translations are not always satisfactory.” ((Davidson, 435.)) Our series seeks to assist scholars and interested readers alike by providing fresh and top-notch parallel Arabic-English translations of each known medical text written by Maimonides, including the long-lost On Rules.

The past year has been a busy one, especially behind the scenes, for the Maxwell Institute’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative. Our new website is up and running and we’re planning to unveil additional offerings there in the near future. We’ve also been preparing a number volumes for publication. We’ve overcome the editorial snags that hindered a few volumes originally scheduled for publication this fall, which are currently being printed. And there are other books in the pipeline slated to appear in 2014:

Elder Ben B. Banks (right), an emeritus Seventy and a member of the Utah Council for Citizen Diplomacy, presents a tribute to Dr. Erlend “Pete” Peterson of BYU last Thursday.