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Montreal venue for spiritual conferences w/very different missions

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  • Montreal venue for spiritual conferences w/very different missions

    The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec)
    May 1, 2004 Saturday Final Edition

    Symposium city: Montreal is venue for spiritual conferences with very
    different missions

    by: HARVEY SHEPHERD

    Montreal will play host over the next few weeks to some religious
    scholars of international renown who want to shake up Christian
    spirituality - and some who want to do anything but.

    On the heels of John Shelby Spong, the controversial former
    Episcopalian (or Anglican) bishop of Newark, N.J., who will lecture in
    Montreal next Friday and Saturday, Matthew Fox, the former Catholic
    priest and advocate of "creation spirituality," will be one of the
    keynote speakers at a 10-day conference that begins Friday, May 14.
    He's a proponent of liberation theology who was eventually silenced by
    the Vatican, became an Episcopalian priest and founded the University
    of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, Calif.

    He and Rupert Sheldrake, a British biochemist who argues "that the mind
    extends beyond the brain," will be among about 60 speakers at the
    annual conference of the Montreal-based Spiritual Science Fellowship
    and its affiliated International Institute of Integral Human Sciences.
    Fox and Sheldrake will speak May 15.

    All this is a far cry from Symposium 2004, at McGill University Sunday
    and Monday, May 30 and 31, and the Universite de Montreal June 1. But
    the sponsors - the Canadian Bible Society, the two universities and
    Acadia University of Wolfville, N.S., through its Montreal-based
    Faculte de theologie evangelique - hope the conference will be historic
    for Canada in its own quiet way.

    The conference is on translation of the Hebrew scriptures (known to
    many Christians as the Old Testament). Speakers will include
    Protestants (at least one with good Orthodox connections), Catholics
    and Jews.

    John Milton, who teaches Bible and Hebrew courses at McGill, is a
    member of the Bible society and has been helping organize the
    conference, said the society wants to raise the scholarly level of its
    translations. This is even though some of the editions it produces and
    distributes now are valuable resources for students of the Bible, and
    not just Christian ones, said Milton, himself Jewish.

    The conference was pulled together largely by Manuel Jinbachian, an
    Armenian Protestant pastor with many years' experience in Bible
    translation in Lebanon and Europe as the academic dean of Haigazian
    University in Beirut and translations consultant for Europe and the
    Middle East for the United Bible Societies - the international
    federation to which the Canadian Bible Society belongs. For about two
    years he has been based in Montreal, teaching at both McGill and the
    Universite de Montreal.

    He is a specialist in the Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew
    scriptures into Greek by Jewish scholars around 2,000 years ago.

    Translating is not just translating words, he told me.

    "We need to study the grammar, syntax, historic background and cultural
    setting of the text and try to transfer the meaning to ordinary
    Canadians living in great urban centres of the 21st century."

    He said, however, that differences in the phraseology of ancient
    versions of the scripture do not indicate divergence in the basic
    meaning, which is always the same. Wiens, too, said that nothing
    scholars have turned up has any negative impact on Christian doctrine.

    Three other Bible translators of international repute will be keynote
    speakers.

    Emmanuel Tov, a professor at the Hebrew University in Israel, is
    editor-in-chief of a Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project.

    Adrien Schenker, a Dominican father (as Matthew Fox used to be),
    teaches at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and is
    editor-in-chief of a major Old Testament text project of the United
    Bible Societies.

    Jan de Waard, an emeritus professor at the Free University of Amsterdam
    and at the University of Strasbourg, France, has been a top
    translations consultant for the United Bible Societies, is co-ordinator
    for work on ancient languages, and is a member of Schenker's text
    project team.

    Nine scholars from Montreal universities will speak at the conference.

    For information about the Bible conference, call (514) 848-9778; for
    the spirituality conference, call (514) 937-8359.

    ---

    This is the last of the regular columns I have written in this space in
    an almost unbroken weekly series since Sept. 7, 1985.

    I wrote the column as a staff reporter (along with other assignments)
    until my voluntary retirement as a Gazette employee last September.
    Since then, I have carried on the column as a freelancer. The newspaper
    wants to go in a different direction for this page, to be explained in
    this space next week.

    The Gazette will publish articles I write on religious and spiritual
    topics from time to time, in this space and elsewhere.

    I want to thank The Gazette and the remarkable people I have
    interviewed and otherwise encountered in preparing these columns for a
    profoundly enriching experience these 19 years.

    [email protected]

    GRAPHIC: Color Photo: RICHARD ARLESS JR, THE GAZETTE; Canadian Bible
    Society store manager Walter Brown (left) and John Milton of McGill
    University look over a Bible, which has been translated into Hungarian,
    at the store in Les Promenades de la Cathedrale.
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