Abstract
The topic of this paper is taken from a well-known African American spiritual, sung by Louis Armstrong and many others: “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home.” This hymn expresses deep feelings of loneliness and estrangement. Two kinds of great distance, one spiritual and the other physical, are implicated: the singer is far away from God’s home and far also from his home and relatives in Africa. In addition, slavery adds strongly to the feeling of estrangement.
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Notes
But, to be honest, “no other Patristic writer [besides Gregory of Nazianzus] seems to have bothered about Athens as a city of their own time.” See S. Rubenson, “The Cappadocians on the Areopagus,” in Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections, ed. J. Börtnes and Thomas Hägg (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), 113.
Pope John Paul II, “Message to Symposium 1979,” in Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic, ed. P. J. Fedwick (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981).
For more about the charity activities, see D. Constantelos, Byzantine Philanthropy and Social Welfare (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1968), 68–69, 154–58, 260–61.
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© 2016 Gunnar af Hällström
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af Hällström, G. (2016). “A Long Way from Home”. In: Dumitraşcu, N. (eds) The Ecumenical Legacy of the Cappadocians. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-50269-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-50269-8_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57505-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-50269-8
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